The Yperayia Theotokos Eleousa, the Merciful Mother of God, is the church of Vlachopoulatika. It stands a few dozen metres from the crossroads by the school buildings.
It is the first entry in the oldest surviving catalogue of the churches of Paxos, drawn up in 1686, which counts thirty nine churches and twenty priests for the whole island. The entry reads simply “Eleousa at Vlachopoulos’s”. The church was built between about 1620 and 1650 by the brothers Dimitrios and Konstantinos Vlachopoulos. A notarial act of 1695 brought in the heirs of Stamatis Kontaris, and from then on the two families held it together. Its icons were painted in 1713 by the hagiographer Christodoulos Margetis.
In July 1739 the Great Protopapas of Corfu, Ioannis Voulgaris, came to inspect it. He recorded that the church took in seventy xestes of oil a harvest, and then listed what it lacked: no chalice, no paten, no silver, no sanctuary doors, no vessel for the host, no holy oil, and the bell towers left unplastered. In the margin he set a deadline. The sacred vessels were to be made without delay, and within one year the sanctuary doors were to be hung and the towers whitewashed.
A will of 1693 shows how the church sat inside family life. Konstantis Vlachopoulos left his whole share to his brother Nikoletos if Nikoletos became a priest; if not, half to him and the other half to the Panagia Eleousa.
The two founding families did not always agree. In 1801 the Kontaratoi and the Vlachopoulatoi formally asked one another for forgiveness. The peace held for a while, and in the end the dispute went to court.
Inside, the altar on the right is dedicated to the Entry of the Virgin into the Temple and the one on the left to Agios Charalambos. The campanile is old and, in the words of the archivist who studied the church, admirable.
What makes the site unusual is what lies above it. The slope behind the churchyard is cut with eighteen rock-hewn cisterns, a whole waterworks carved into the stone. On an island with almost no springs, cisterns were the difference between a hamlet that could survive the summer and one that could not.
On Easter Monday the icon of the Eleousa joins the procession that climbs from the square of Gaios to Agios Georgios at Vellianitatika, together with the icons of the Panagia of the Vellianites and of Agios Charalambos.
Where to find it: below the rocks of Agios Charalambos, with one road going off to Vlachopoulatika and another to Kokkinatika. The eighteen cisterns are cut into the slope a few metres behind the graveyard. They belonged to the households of Vlachopoulatika, some with a square mouth and a bolted door, others roofed over with stone slabs.
