Iona, the island of Saint Columba in the Hebrides

Off the west coast of Scotland, separated from the island of Mull by a narrow sound, Iona is little more than five kilometres long. Yet few islands have played so great a role in the religious and cultural history of the British Isles. Here, in the sixth century, an Irish monk founded a monastery that became the centre of a network of communities stretching from Scotland to northern England, and from which missions, books and saints went forth.

The arrival of Columba

In 563 Columba, in Irish Colum Cille, came to Iona from Ireland with twelve companions. He belonged to a powerful Ulster lineage, the Uí Néill, and the reasons for his departure are debated: some later traditions link them to a battle and a form of penance, but these are unverifiable tales. The king of Dál Riata, a Gaelic kingdom straddling Ireland and Scotland, granted him the island.

The main source on his life is the Vita Columbae, written around 700 by Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona. The work, divided into three books devoted to prophecies, miracles and angelic visions, is also a precious document on the daily life of the monastery: work in the fields, the copying of books, the welcoming of guests who arrived by sea. Columba died on the island in 597.

Books and missionaries

From Iona went the monks who evangelised Northumbria. In 635 Aidan, sent from the island at the request of King Oswald, founded the monastery of Lindisfarne, which in turn became a beacon of Christian culture. The monastic tradition of Iona, tied to Ireland, was distinguished by certain customs, such as the calculation of the date of Easter, which were debated with the Church of Roman tradition until the Synod of Whitby in 664.

Many scholars believe that the Book of Kells, the most famous illuminated manuscript of the early Middle Ages, now kept at Trinity College Dublin, was begun on Iona and completed at Kells, in Ireland, where the community took refuge. The hypothesis is widely accepted but not proved with certainty. Tall stone crosses still survive on the island, such as Saint Martin's Cross, of the eighth century, which stands in its original position.

Vikings, abbey and tombs of the kings

From the end of the eighth century Iona was struck repeatedly by the Vikings: the chronicles record raids in 795, 802 and 806, when sixty-eight members of the community were killed, and the martyrdom of the monk Blathmac in 825. Most of the monks moved to Kells, but the island was never entirely abandoned. At the beginning of the thirteenth century a Benedictine abbey and a convent of Augustinian nuns were founded there.

Beside the abbey lies the Reilig Odhráin, the ancient burial ground where, according to the tradition reported by medieval chronicles, many kings of Scotland were buried, among them Duncan and Macbeth. In 1773 Samuel Johnson visited the island and wrote that a man was little to be envied whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona. In 1938 the Iona Community was founded, which restored the abbey and made it once again a place of meeting and prayer.