Panagia Apsinthiotissa

According to a local legend, the monastery was named after a wormwood bush that covered the mouth of the cave in which a monk had hidden an icon of the Virgin Mary in order to save it during the period of Byzantine Iconoclasm.

[2] The monastery was probably established in the eleventh or twelfth century as a Byzantine imperial foundation and continued to enjoy a degree of prominence in the Lusignan and Venetian periods.

Leontios, the abbot in about 1222, was one of the delegates sent to report the plight of the Orthodox Church under Latin jurisdiction to the Patriarch Germanos II in the Empire of Nicaea.

The main church of the monastery appears to have been built in the twelfth century and has a cross-in-square plan of the Byzantine type surmounted by a high dome.

Tassos Papacostas, Inventory of Byzantine Churches on Cyprus, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-897747-31-5 [1] List and evaluation of Greek and Turkish Religious Buildings [2] The Refectory of Panagia Apsinthiotissa in 3D (EpHEMERA Database)

Distant view of the monastery of Panagia Apsinthiotissa from the south in 2009.
Church at the monastery of Panagia Apsinthiotissa from the east in 2009.
Panagia Apsinthiotissa, the ruined narthex, as drawn by Camille Enlart in the late nineteenth century.