Church of the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel

Worth a detour

A small thirteenth-century church on Venera Street, thirteen point nine metres by five point three, single-naved and cruciform with a narthex, and decorated with a rigour that repays a close look: arches underlined by triple rows of green glazed ceramic plates, and the panels beneath filled with small stone blocks and paired bricks laid in chessboard order. The dome and the bell tower are gone. It is free and it takes ten minutes.

Story

Background

The church had three doors — one on the north wall straight into the nave, two into the narthex — and three small multilateral apses at the east end pierced by openings. A rectangular tower stood over the narthex and was reached, as at Pantocrator, by a stone stair concealed inside the west wall. Both tower and dome have gone; what remains is the body of the building and its skin.

The skin is the interest. Where Aliturgetos is exuberant, the Archangels is disciplined: the green glazed discs are used in threes, the brick is laid in a strict alternating pattern, and the whole facade reads as a controlled exercise rather than a display. Seeing the two within ten minutes of each other is the best short lesson in the style there is.

The museum dates it to the thirteenth century on its monument page and the fourteenth on its history page, and nobody has settled it. The church is the third stop on the municipality's Spiritual Path route, but it is not in the museum's ticket scheme and no opening hours are published for it, so plan on the outside. That is not much of a loss: the interior is bare, and the point of these buildings was always what they showed to the street.