Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

"The buried icon and the Lourdes of the Aegean"

Tinos (Greece) (1822-1823)

On the island of Tinos, in the Cyclades archipelago, stands the Church of Panagia Evangelistria, affectionately known as Megalochari, "the Great One Full of Grace." It is Greece's great national shrine, primarily for Orthodox Christians, and the Greeks love it with a fervor reminiscent of Lourdes in France or Fatima in Portugal. The Virgin of Tinos is considered the protector of sailors and the comforter of the sick.

Tradition tells that in July 1822, at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Angels, Sister Pelagia dreamed for three consecutive Sundays of a luminous lady who entered her cell enveloped in the scent of flowers and asked her to find a buried icon, "where she can no longer remain." The authorities were notified, and excavations began in September of that year; at first, only the ruins of an old church and a dry well were unearthed. But on January 30, 1823, a worker named Vlassis struck an object with his hoe: it was an icon of the Annunciation, broken in two, which was cleaned and reassembled. The white marble sanctuary was then built upon this discovery.

It is important to distinguish between documented fact and pious belief. It is documented that excavations took place in Tinos between 1822 and 1823, that an ancient icon was discovered in January 1823, and that the site became the main pilgrimage center in Greece, linked to the national rebirth after the War of Independence. However, the visions of Sister Pelagia, with all their details, the idea that the icon had been buried for some eight hundred years, and the former attribution of the icon to Saint Luke—now considered uncertain, as no dating exists to confirm it—belong to devotional tradition. A spring flows at the site of the discovery, attracting the sick, and for this reason, many call Tinos "the Lourdes of the Aegean."

Tinos is primarily an Orthodox shrine, although Catholic pilgrims also visit; a formal and regular joint celebration is not mentioned in the sources. The Latin Rosary is not the traditional prayer of the place, but a Catholic can easily combine devotion to the Annunciation of Tinos with the first joyful mystery of the Rosary.