Church of the Archangel Michael

In 1327 or 1328, four families from the village of Kavalariana — Theotokis Kotzis, Manouel Melisourgos, and Nikitas and Demetrios Sideris — pooled their resources to build and decorate a church. They commissioned a painter we know by name: Ioannis Pagomenos, who signed the dedicatory inscription with characteristic Byzantine modesty as "perhaps also a painter" (τάχα κε ζωγράφου). Pagomenos was the most prolific artist working in fourteenth-century Selino, responsible for churches at Komitades, Anisaraki, Kakodiki, and numerous other villages. At Kavalariana he left one of his finest surviving groups of donor portraits. Fourteen figures — men, women, children — look out at us from the central blind arches of the north and south walls, seven to each side, arranged in perfect symmetry. Together they form something unparalleled on Crete: a family portrait gallery embedded directly within the church's sacred iconographic programme. The north wall belongs to the Kotzis family — Theotokis, his wife Anna, their children; the south wall to the Melisourgos and Sideris families. Women with covered heads indicate married or widowed status by Byzantine convention; young girls wear their hair loose. Most of the men wear mi-partie garments — fabrics with chequerboard or striped heraldic patterns, a fashion that blended the island's two worlds — while Theotokis Kotzis alone opted for traditional Byzantine dress. Between the two groups runs a dedicatory inscription unique in Cretan epigraphy: the donors address their Venetian rulers as "great and masters" (μεγάλων κε ἀφέντον). At a time when Veneto-Cretan relations were generally tense, this formula reads as a diplomatic anomaly. Angeliki Lymberopoulou, who devoted her doctoral monograph to this church, suggests it reflects not flattery but pragmatic community strategy: these families were building their burial church, and they had every reason to stay on the right side of those in power. The interior is single-nave, barrel-vaulted, supported on four sphendonia, with three blind arches on each long wall. The apse retains a damaged Pantokrator surrounded by hierarchs. On the south wall, in a blind arch, Saint George on horseback — gold armour on gold ground: warrior and patron. Lassithiotakis's catalogue records a rich programme including the Annunciation, Transfiguration, Ascension, Betrayal, Christ of Sorrows (Epitafios), and a range of saints — Constantine, Titus, Cyril, Sophia, Photios, Polycarp, Eleutherios. The church stands within a cemetery. This too was deliberate: the Archangel Michael weighs souls at the Last Judgement. The donors knew where they wanted to end up — and made sure the right patron was close at hand.