Kakopetria

The name reads as "bad rock," from the Greek kako and petra, and the village keeps two explanations for it. The plain one is the ground itself: hard stone and boulders on a steep valley shoulder. The other is a tradition, not a fact, about a large rock where newly married couples once sat for luck, until the day it is said to have rolled over one pair and left the village its unlucky name. Below the newer streets, Palia Kakopetria is the old stone quarter, a protected ancient monument under the Department of Antiquities since the first houses were restored in 1980. Its close-packed houses, wooden balconies, and repaired watermills line the lane where the Kargotis and Garillis meet, the same water that feeds the Solea valley all the way down to the Morphou plain. The valley's real fame is its painted churches. Agios Nikolaos tis Stegis, up the forest road above the village, is the only surviving eleventh-century monastery church of its kind on the island, its frescoes layered over six centuries beneath the steep timber roof, added a century later, that gives the church its name. It shares the 1985 UNESCO listing with Panagia Podithou, a short way down the valley at Galata, so two of the ten painted Troodos churches stand within the same short drive.