Panagia Karmiotissa

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Panagia Karmiotissa
Interior
Archaeological excavations, 2018

The Panagia Karmiotissa is a former Carmelite monastery church in Limassol in Cyprus . The church is now a pilgrimage church of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus near a spring revered as miraculous. It is the only preserved Gothic sacred building in Limassol from the Frankish crusader rule of the House of Lusignan on Cyprus.

history

The exact founding circumstances of the Carmelite settlement in the mountains at the gates of Limassol are not known. Presumably members of the order settled in connection with the Latin Patriarch of Constantinople , St. Peter Thomas , who was a Carmelite and promoted the Order in Cyprus. He died in 1365 in the Carmelite monastery of Famagusta .

The monastery church was erected in strict Gothic forms without any structural adornment with a rectangular single nave with a straight choir closure and illuminated by a few lancet windows. The interior is vaulted by a pointed arch barrel and its austere design is reminiscent of the Carmelite monastery of Saint-Hilaire near Ménerbes in southern France, which was founded in 1254 by Carmelites who had returned from the Holy Land. After Limassol was captured by the Ottomans in July 1570, the monastery church was not destroyed and subsequently fell into the hands of the Orthodox .

The art historians Camille Enlart and George Jeffery were able to examine the remains of a narthex on the west side of the monastery church around 1900 , where the small sculpture of a friar of the Latin Church was found, which Jeffery interprets as a Carmelite. Today there are only attachments of a narthex on the west side with consoles that show figurative representations. In 2018 archaeological excavations took place at the church.

literature

  • Nicholas Coureas: The Latin Church in Cyprus 1195–1312 , Aldershot 1997, p. 215. (Coureas, for example, doubts, despite the field name Karmi , that it was a Carmelite monastery.)
  • Camille Enlart (translated by David Hunt): Gothic Art and the Renaissance in Cyprus . Paris 1899 / London 1987, pp. 345-348.
  • George Jeffery: A Description of the Historic Monuments of Cyprus, 1918, p. 360.

Web links

Commons : Panagia Karmiotissa  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cyprusalive.com
  2. ↑ see drawing in Enlart, p. 345, and Jeffery, p. 360.

Coordinates: 34 ° 42 ′ 42.6 ″  N , 32 ° 58 ′ 45.6 ″  E