A Byzantine-Gothic monastery and the taste of absinthe

Barsky then moved on to the Monastery of Panagia Apsinthiotissa (Wormwood), situated on the southern slopes of the Pentadaktylos mountain range, between the Monastery of St. John Chrysostomos in Koutsovendis and Bellapais Abbey. Nearby is a small settlement, which for some reason is today named Tashkent, like the capital of Uzbekistan. Until 1974 it bore a Greek name, Vounó (Βουνό), meaning “mountain”. Today the monastery lies empty: it was abandoned in 1974 following the Turkish invasion. Greek and Turkish architects have been monitoring its condition since 2003, and the buildings have been mothballed.

The church is of the cross-in-square type, with one dome and a three-section altar. The side apses are set into the masonry of the eastern wall and only the central one is visible from the outside. The church appears to have been built in the 12th century, before the founding of the monastery.

The Gothic narthex, sketched by the French explorer Camille Enlart in the 19th century, dates back to the 15th century.

Nearby there is also a Gothic refectory, which is relatively well preserved.

There are also monks’ cells, though it is unclear to what period they date.

According to legend, the monastery was founded after Byzantium returned to icon veneration in the mid-9th century, following a period of iconoclasm. In the cave, whose entrance was overgrown with wormwood, an icon of the Mother of God was discovered. It had been hidden there in the past by monks to protect it from iconoclasts. It was here that the monastery was founded, named in honour of the “Mother of God of Wormwood”. The complex was first mentioned by the Cypriot chronicler Georgios Bustronios (1546–1489), under the name of Psithia. Judging by the architectural style of the main church, the monastery was indeed founded in the Byzantine era, and later also flourished under the Catholic Lusignans (1) and Venetians. Unfortunately, there are no written sources recording the history of the monastery, meaning that the ruins of the monastery itself are the sole document. A letter written by Patriarch Germanus of Constantinople informs us that in 1223 Abbot Leontios from the Monastery of Panagia Apsinthiotissa, accompanied by his namesake Bishop Leontios of Solea (2), went to Nicaea, then the capital of the Byzantine state, to request support for the Orthodox Church of Cyprus in its fight against Catholic oppression. The next mention of the monastery is found in the Chronicle of Georgios Bustronios. Bustronios refers to a conspiracy to hand over the fortress of Kyrenia to Charlotte of Bourbon (the second wife of King Janus of Cyprus (1398-1432)) on 15 August 1473, which “began as a pilgrimage to Psithia”. The same chronicler writes that “in 1487... on the first of February the queen [Catherine Cornaro] went to worship at Psithia”. In 1530 the hieromonk Ambrosius from the Monastery of Andrea in Lefkosia wrote an ecclesiastical calendar, which he donated to the Monastery of Panagia Apsinthiotissa. According to a report on Cyprus commissioned by Venice and written in Italian, at the end of the 15th and during the first half of the 16th century, the Monastery of Panagia Apsinthiotissa owned considerable property, two villages and an income of 200 ducats. Given that Bustronios writes about a pilgrimage to this monastery made by the queen in 1487, there are grounds to believe that it was under Latin jurisdiction.

After the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus in the 16th century the church was subordinated to the monastery of St. John Chrysostomos at Koutsovendis and the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. It was in this state that Barsky found it.

There I tarried for four days, and from there I went to another monastery, an hour away on foot, founded in the name of the Holy Mother of God, called Apsinthiotissa, that is, Wormwood (3), since they say that a very ancient icon (4), which was there even before the foundation of the monastery, was discovered in a small cave overgrown with wormwood bushes. By whom and when the monastery was founded, I could not find out, it being very deserted, and there was only one hieromonk in it; he lived very poorly and was subordinate to the abbot of the monastery of John Chrysostomos [at Koutsovendis].

The monastery was once large and beautiful; it stands on a level place, close to the mountains; it has a big and beautifully situated church, with one dome. Yet, it has fallen into great disrepair and abandonment and is ready to collapse, because in that year many stone buildings collapsed and fell from an earthquake; the monks cannot increase their number and look after it, due to the intolerable Turkish levies. There are two or three cells, in which a hieromonk lives with one novice, they feed from the labour of their hands: they have a small water source, but it is healthy, and the air is healthy too.

There I spent a day and a night, and in the morning, when I awoke, this hieromonk took me to see another distinguished building (I will talk about it later), because the path was difficult and rough, and without a guide I would not have reached it myself.

Stranstvovaniya Vasiliya Grigorovicha-Barskogo po svyatym mestam Vostoka c 1723 po 1747 / Edited by N. Barsukov. Part 2. (St. Petersburg, 1886), 245-247.

Location and the route

Coordinates: 35.284070 33.389500 − Monastery of Panagia Apsinthiotissa

Notes

(1) The House of Lusignan was a royal house of French origin, which at various times ruled several principalities in Europe and the Levant, including the kingdoms of Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Armenia, from the 12th through the 15th centuries during the Middle Ages. It also had great influence in England and France.
(2) A valley on the northern slopes of the Troodos Mountains in Cyprus, Solea was also a diocese at the time of these events.
(3) From the Greek. Αρτεμισία το αψίνθιον (Artemisía to apsínthion), meaning “bitter wormwood”. In Latin it has essentially the same name: Artemísia absínthium. It is this word that is the origin for the name of the spirit absinth, of which wormwood is one of the key ingredients.
(4) The art historian and icon expert Nikodim Kondakov mentioned this icon in his monumental work Ikonografia Bogomateri, using Barsky as a source. It is worth noting that the discovery of an icon in the depths of a forest or cave is quite typical for the Greek world after the Ottoman conquest. It should also be emphasised that in the Cypriot tradition, and more broadly in the Greek tradition, there is a tendency to associate images of the Mother of God with the names of flowers and fragrant plants.

Literature, links

Zykova N. V., Palomnichestvo na Kipr pravoslavny (po stopam Vasiliya Grigorovicha-Barskogo), (Larnaca, Izdatelstvo Russkogo pravoslavnogo obrazovatelnogo tsentra, 2013), 22-24.

Camille Enlart, Gothic Art and the Renaissance in Cyprus, Trans. David Hunt (London, 1987) Fig. 150, 205–206.

Richard McGillivray Dawkins, The Chronicle of George Boustronious, 1456-1489 (Melbourne, 1964)

George H. Everett Jeffery, A Description of the Historic Monuments of Cyprus (Nicosia, 1918, reprint. ed. London, 1983), p. 275.

Wikipedia has a short description of the monastery

Polignosi, the Encyclopaedia of Cyprus