SAT 8 AUG/Sunset 19:44
What's on in
Platanistasa
The roof comes right down past the walls into a portico on all four sides, the only Cyprus church built that way.
Platanistasa is a quiet Pitsilia village whose reason to visit stands a few kilometres outside it: Stavros tou Agiasmati, one of the ten UNESCO-listed painted churches of the Troodos.
The reason to make the climb stands a few kilometres north of the houses: a timber-roofed former monastery church whose walls the painter Philippos Goul covered with frescoes in 1494. The village itself is small and near-empty, a handful of stone lanes on the hazelnut slopes of Pitsilia, with its own parish church of Agios Ioannis Theologos and a folk-art museum near the square. What pulls visitors up the mountain is the painting, not the village.
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The frescoes of Stavros tou Agiasmati
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.
Attractions in Platanistasa
The durable layer leads when the events feed is quiet, these are open whatever the calendar says.
