Church of the Archangel Michael

Locals still call it "Kouneni," not "Vathi" — the name changed officially in 1957, but as Lassithiotakis already noted back in the 1960s, the old name never quite left people's memory, or the maps. The church stands a short way outside the village, to the west, close to the stream. Locals also call it "tou Astratigou" — the [Church] of the Commander [of the Heavenly Hosts]. The building is austere to the point of bareness: one simple hall, 3 by just under 6 metres, its axis skewed slightly north (about 20°), built of rubble masonry. Nothing remarkable from the outside — all the beauty is inside. And inside, there really is something to see. The pointed barrel vault carries thirteen scenes from the Twelve Feasts and the Passion cycle — from the Nativity to the Ascension — and among them one genuinely rare one: the Miracle of Archangel Michael at Chonae (Colossae in Phrygia). The legend tells of a spring-shrine that pagans tried to drown by diverting two rivers onto it — and Michael, striking the rock with his staff, opened a chasm and sent the waters underground, saving the shrine. In Vathi the painter shows only one river instead of two — the same simplification appears at Gračanica (1321) and on an icon from the Loverdos collection, late 13th–early 14th century. Above the entrance there once ran a large founder's inscription across the full width of the wall — and that was exactly where the date sat. Unfortunately, during some repair of the wooden lintel, precisely that part was destroyed. For decades, then, the church was dated only comparatively, "roughly," to the first quarter of the 14th century. Only in 2018 did Theodora Ioannidou, re-reading what survives of the inscription, decipher something no one had noticed before: the signature "Παγωμένου καὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ Νικολάου" — "of Pagomenos and his son Nikolaos." It's the only known case where a workshop signature explicitly states a father-son relationship, rather than just two collaborating painters. The year, worked out from the surviving indiction and from a graffito on the exterior lintel: 1336/37. Which means: this church was painted by a family, not just a workshop. A nice thing to think about, standing inside.