Platanistasa

Stavros tou Agiasmati began as the katholikon, the main church of a small monastery of the same name, put up at the end of the 15th century. The name traces to agiasma, a sanctified spring or well beside a church, though one account ties it instead to refugees from a place called Agiasmati in Asia Minor. The building is low and barn-like under a steep timber roof of flat tiles, the everyday mountain style of the region. In 1494 the painter Philippos Goul, a Greek-educated Syrian Orthodox, filled the interior in a single campaign. Multi-figure scenes from the New Testament run along the upper walls, rows of individual saints stand below them, and on the north arch a miniature cycle tells the finding of the Holy Cross that gives the church its name. It survives as one of the most complete sets of late-15th-century wall painting on Cyprus, which is why it was among the first Troodos churches UNESCO inscribed in 1985. The village below keeps a scatter of its own churches: Agios Ioannis Theologos by the square, Archangel Michael and the folk-art museum a few steps on, and Panagia Katafigiotissa and Agios Georgios out along the slopes toward the hazelnut woods. None hold anything like Goul's frescoes, and most people drive straight past them to the painted church, but they are what the village actually prays in.