Church of St. Nicholas of the Roof

The Church of St. Nicholas of the Roof (Greek: Άγιος Νικόλαος της Στέγης, Agios Nikolaos Tis Stegis) is an 11th-century Byzantine monastery that flourished in Kakopetria, Cyprus.

Because of its independent and powerful hierarchical system, heresies such as Arianism and Monophysitism did not affect Cyprus as they did other Byzantine provinces" (Stewart 162-163).

Astonishingly romantic, these building invoke an image of French courtly culture transposed to the Middle East" (Weyl 340).

In heads such as those of the apostles in scenes and that of the Gabriel lately uncovered in the apse we see the deep-set staring eyes of the expressionist style which fresco painters of the time inherited from Byzantine miniaturists of the Macedonian renaissance" (Megaw 82).

The murals depict scenes from the life of Jesus, the Raising of Lazarus, the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, and some isolated figures.

Author, Megaw explains, "Much of St. Nicholas of the Roof was redecorated in the 12th century with more sophisticated paintings, among them the usual series of Church Fathers on the apse wall which in this case includes a characteristic representation of St. Epiphanius.

We will see more of this Comneniam style which in Cyprus is explicable only in the injection of new talent in the shape of masters who had been trained outside the Island, some of them perhaps in Constantinople itself" (Megaw 82).