Gemile Island

This guide to Gemile Island follows the sunken harbor visible just off its northern shore, and the three centuries the island spent as a waystation for pilgrims sailing between Constantinople and Jerusalem. It traces the local tradition that Nicholas of Myra, patron saint of sailors, was first buried in a church cut into the island's highest rock, and the ship a sailor once scratched into that church's plaster. Walk the covered pilgrim corridor past its five churches and dozens of tombs.