AT A GLANCE
Why go?
High in the pine-clad Troodos Mountains, at roughly 1,300 metres on the island's southern slopes, the Holy Monastery of Panagia Trooditissa is one of Cyprus's oldest and most quietly revered monastic sites. Founded in legend around 990 AD by a hermit fleeing the iconoclastic persecution, it has survived fires, conquest and rebuilding to become a working Orthodox community and a pilgrimage destination, its katholikon consecrated to the Dormition of the Virgin Mary.↗↗↗
The monastery's heart is its miraculous icon of the Theotokos, painted on cedar wood and long venerated for granting children to childless couples. Set in a forested hollow between the villages of Platres and Prodromos and reached by a mountain road, Trooditissa offers something rarer than a museum piece: a living place of hesychasm and prayer, where a nineteenth-century visitor called it 'the first step towards heaven.'↗↗↗