Below the church of Ypapanti, in the stream bed the old people called Skandali, water comes out of the rock. It is one of the few places on Paxos where that happens, which is why there are four wells here, one close to the next. The one beside the church we call Circe’s Spring.
Archduke Ludwig Salvator described them one by one in the 1880s. The first has a broad paved terrace in front, where the stepped lane to Kastanida and Lakka used to pass. The second is open, ringed with maidenhair fern, and its water arrives along a channel cut in the rock. The third, below the steps, has a mouth like a small chapel and held the most water: the stone at its lip was worn hollow by the water jars. The fourth is round and gave only a trickle.
Tradition says that the miraculous icon of Ypapanti was found hidden in one of them. It says something else too: that under the ground a passage joins the church to the great sea cave of Ypapanti on the west coast, the cave where, so the story goes, the submarine Papanikolis hid during the war. Nobody has ever found the passage.
The name of Circe ties the spring to an idea that keeps coming back: that Paxos is Homer’s Aeaea, the island where the enchantress kept Odysseus for a year. If so, this is where she drew her water.
