Church of Panagia Phorviotissa (Asinou)
Barn-roofed Byzantine chapel in the Troodos foothills, lined with wall paintings from 1105 onwards.
Asinou stands alone in a wooded valley about five kilometres south-west of Nikitari, on the northern slopes of the Troodos. The single-aisled vaulted nave was built in 1105 or 1106 as the katholikon of a monastery founded by Nikephoros Magistros, a Byzantine official whose donor portrait appears inside. A domed narthex was added at the western end later in the twelfth century. The steep second roof of flat tiles, carried on timbers above the vault, is the local device for shedding mountain rain and snow.
The interior is covered almost entirely with wall paintings, applied in successive campaigns between the early twelfth and the seventeenth centuries and repeatedly cleaned and consolidated since the 1960s. The earliest layer, of 1105 to 1106, is among the finest Comnenian painting surviving outside Constantinople. Asinou was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985 as one of the ten painted churches in the Troodos region, later extended to eleven. It remains a working church under the Bishopric of Morphou.
Highlights
- Comnenian wall paintings of 1105–06 in the nave
- Donor portrait of the founder Nikephoros Magistros
- Domed narthex added in the later twelfth century
- One of the UNESCO-listed painted churches of the Troodos
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