Evangelistria began with a quarrel about how to worship. In 1794, a group of Kollyvades monks left the great monastic republic of Mount Athos after disagreements over Christian ritual - chiefly the proper day for memorial services. Rather than yield, they came to Skiathos. Their leader was Niphon of Chios, an ordained monk, and among them was Gregorios Hatzistamatis, a local who had inherited land on the island from his father. On that inherited ground they built their refuge and dedicated it to the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, the moment in Christian belief when Mary learns she will bear Christ. The Annunciation falls on 25 March - a date that would later carry a second meaning for every Greek, as the day the War of Independence is said to have begun.

Thirteen years after its founding, the monastery became a forge for something larger than itself. In 1807, Greek freedom fighters met here and swore the Oath of Freedom on a newly designed flag - a white cross on a sky-blue field, woven on a loom at the site. Among the men who bound themselves to it were Theodoros Kolokotronis, who would become the war's most celebrated general, and the naval commander Andreas Vokos Miaoulis, alongside Thymios Vlachavas, Nikotsaras, and others. The flag was designed, woven, blessed, and raised here, years before the revolution it promised. The cross-and-blue design is the ancestor of the flag Greece flies today, and the original loom still stands in the monastery museum - an ordinary wooden frame that helped weave a national symbol.

At the center of the complex stands the Catholicon, a Byzantine-style cross-in-square church with three aisles and three domes. Its iconostasis - the carved wooden screen separating nave from sanctuary - bears icons painted in the 17th and 18th centuries, their gold grounds darkened by candle smoke and time. The museum holds priests' vestments, manuscripts and rare books from the 1600s, gospels from the 1700s, silver and wooden crosses, and Byzantine icons, along with a photographic record of the War of Independence that raged from 1821 to 1829. Some buildings here fell to ruin over the centuries, but the church and the living quarters have been restored, and the place breathes again.

Faith on Skiathos keeps a slower rhythm than the beaches below. The monks tend vineyards that produce Alypiakos, a red Muscat named for Father Alypos, the monastery's fourth abbot - a grape the island has cultivated since the 5th century BC, used now on religious occasions. Today only four monks live here, with three others associated from elsewhere; the community is small, but the calendar still turns. Each 25 March the ceremony of the Annunciation fills the church. You reach Evangelistria on foot up a steep paved road from town, or by the minibus that climbs from the Skiathos bus terminus, and entry is usually free - an open door at the place where a flag became a country.