Early Hermitages at Prodromos Monastery
The Prodromos site preserves memories of earlier hermitages and a church tradition reaching back to the medieval Lousios.
Why it matters
It explains why the Lousios cliffs became a long-lived monastic landscape before the better-documented post-Byzantine monastery.
Regional monument descriptions record an older ascetic tradition at the place of the present Monastery of St. John the Baptist. Oral traditions connect one of the hermitages with a church dedicated to St. John around 1167, while many scholars place the organized monastery later, at the end of the 16th century.
For the timeline, this entry should be read as the early spiritual layer of the Prodromos site, not as a final architectural foundation date for the monastery complex.