The Painted Churches of the Troodos

Why they look like barns

A Byzantine church is supposed to announce itself — a dome, a drum, worked stone, something that reads as important from a distance. These do the opposite. They are small rubble-walled boxes under enormous pitched timber roofs that come down almost to the ground, so that from a field away you would take one for a hay barn or a byre. The roof is a practical answer to a real problem: these are mountain villages that get serious snow, and a flat Byzantine roof would have collapsed or leaked within a generation.

But the same roof did something its builders never intended. A building that looks like a shed, in a village at the end of a mountain road, is not worth anyone's trouble. Through centuries in which grander churches on the coast were converted, stripped, rebuilt or knocked down, these were beneath notice — too remote to matter and too plain to want. One of them is actually named for the arrangement: Agios Nikolaos tis Stegis means Saint Nicholas of the Roof, after the second protective roof built over the original.

So the disappointing exterior is not a thing to get past on the way to the frescoes. It is the mechanism that produced them. Almost nowhere else in the Orthodox world can you stand in a complete painted interior of this age, and the reason you can here is that nobody ever thought these buildings were worth the effort.

What is actually inside

The interiors are painted floor to ceiling — not a panel here and an icon there, but continuous cycles covering every surface of a room small enough to take in at once. The effect is closer to standing inside a decorated box than to visiting a gallery. Because they were painted over roughly five centuries, and because different villages had money at different times, no two are alike: some hold a single coherent programme from one campaign, others carry layers from several, occasionally with an older face showing through where a later coat has failed.

They are also not uniform in quality, and it is worth knowing that before you plan. Two or three of the ten hold work that stands with the best surviving Byzantine painting anywhere. Others are humbler village work — still complete, still centuries old, but plainly made by someone less able. A visitor who sees the finest one first and then four more will feel the drop; a visitor who sees three chosen for contrast will understand what they are looking at.

Light is the other thing nobody warns you about. There are few windows, the walls are dark with age, and most of these buildings have no lighting worth the name. Your eyes need several minutes to adjust before the paintings resolve out of the gloom, so the worst thing you can do is put your head in, decide there is not much there, and leave.

Choosing three rather than chasing ten

Ten churches spread across four districts of mountain road is not a day out, and treating the list as something to complete is the commonest mistake made here. The driving between them is slow, winding and genuinely tiring, and the tenth church looks a great deal like the seventh to an eye that has stopped noticing.

Three in a day is a good day. Four is possible and starts to feel like work. The ones worth building a day around are Panagia Forviotissa at Asinou, which most people rate the finest interior of the set; Panagia tou Araka at Lagoudera, which holds an intact painted dome; and Agios Nikolaos tis Stegis near Kakopetria, which is the clearest illustration of the roof story. Archangelos Michail at Pedoulas and Timios Stavros at Pelendri are the strongest of the rest if you are staying longer or approaching from a different side of the range.

The locked door and the key in the village

Most of these churches are kept locked, and this is the single practical fact that decides whether your day works. They are not staffed sites with a ticket desk. A caretaker in the nearby village holds the key, opens up for visitors, and is often an elderly person doing it as a village duty rather than a job. Sometimes they are sitting outside when you arrive. Sometimes there is a note on the door, or a neighbour who will go and fetch them, or nobody at all for half an hour.

Plan around that rather than against it. Arrive in the middle of the day rather than early or late, do not turn up in the two hours after lunch when a village is at its quietest, and build enough slack into the schedule that one closed door does not wreck the afternoon. It is normal and expected to leave something in the box for the upkeep of the building when you go, and it is worth having small notes on you for that rather than nothing at all.

Ordinary conduct applies inside, and it matters more here than at a ruin. Several of these are still the working parish church of the village. Cover shoulders and knees, keep your voice down, and take the no-photography signs seriously — flash is genuinely damaging to pigment this old, and in the churches that allow pictures at all, it is usually only without it.

Driving the range

The churches sit on the flanks of a mountain range that fills the middle of the island, rising to just under two thousand metres, and they are distributed around it rather than strung along one road. That means your route is dictated by which side you approach from: the Solea and Marathasa valleys on the north side hold one cluster, the Pitsillia villages to the east another, and the southern slopes above the wine country a third.

A car is effectively required. Bus services exist between the larger mountain villages but not on a timetable that lets you reach a church, wait for a key and move on to another. The roads are well surfaced and well signed but constantly turning, so distances that look trivial take two or three times what the map suggests, and anyone prone to travel sickness will feel it. In winter the higher roads carry snow, and the range is high enough that this genuinely closes routes rather than merely slowing them.