The icon of Panagia Kanala depicts the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child in her left arm, leaning her head slightly toward him — a tender, precisely rendered gesture that places this work within the tradition of Byzantine and post-Byzantine Marian iconography. The Archangels Gabriel and Michael appear to either side of the central figures. The icon is attributed to the hagiographer Emmanuel Skordilis, a Cretan icon painter active in the mid-to-late 17th century who settled in the Cyclades and produced work for churches across the eastern Mediterranean. The icon measures approximately one meter in height. It is described as wonderworking — the term used in Orthodox tradition for an icon credited with miraculous intercessions — and has been venerated as such by pilgrims visiting Kanala for generations.

The monastery of Panagia Kanala stands on a hillside above the bay of the same name, on the southeastern coast of Kythnos. The bay itself has developed into a small coastal settlement — one of several such communities that have grown at Kythnos's more accessible beaches over recent decades. But the monastery predates the settlement; it was the reason pilgrims came to this part of the coast before there was much else here. The church was constructed on the site the Virgin indicated in the fishermen's dream, and the combination of hillside location, bay view, and sacred image gives Kanala a quality distinct from the island's other religious sites. Where churches like Saint Savvas in Chora are embedded in village life, Panagia Kanala stands slightly apart from it — a destination that draws visitors specifically to the icon.

In 1973, the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece issued a formal decree recognizing the church of Panagia Kanala as a Holy Pilgrimage — an official designation that acknowledges the site's place in Greek Orthodox devotional life and its significance to believers beyond the island itself. The designation confirmed what Kythnians already knew: that the icon's reputation extended well beyond the shoreline visible from the monastery's hillside. Pilgrims come from throughout the Cyclades, from Athens, and from further afield, particularly around the Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin on August 15, one of the most important dates in the Orthodox calendar. That feast draws the largest gatherings to Kanala each year — the bay below filling with boats, the hillside with the faithful.

Panagia Kanala is the patron of Kythnos. On an island that counts well over a hundred churches and chapels, many of which serve specific villages, neighborhoods, or feast-day communities, the monastery above Kanala holds a different status — not merely a local church but the island's highest religious point of reference. The icon's origin story, with its nighttime discovery at sea and its divinely directed placement, encodes something important about how Kythnians have understood their relationship to the sea, to the divine, and to each other across the centuries. An island people, dependent on boats and the waters between islands, found their patron in an icon that came to them from the water. The monastery they built for her has stood above the bay ever since.