Kykkos Monastery, home to Cyprus's most venerated icon since the end of the eleventh century, turns out to be tied just as directly to the island's twentieth century political history as to its medieval religious one. Archbishop Makarios III, who went on to become the first president of an independent Cyprus, began his monastic life at Kykkos in 1926, decades before either the presidency or independence existed. During the 1974 coup mounted against him, the monastery's own Nicosia dependency, the Metochion Kykkou, was struck by tank fire and partly collapsed, and Makarios is buried today at Throni, on the mountainside above the monastery itself, a burial site chosen specifically for its connection to the institution where his religious life had begun.
That layering of medieval devotion and modern nationalism is not incidental to how Kykkos is understood today. The wealthiest and most lavish monastery on the island, sitting at 1,318 meters in the Troodos Mountains with a current church building dating to 1745 after earlier structures were repeatedly destroyed by fire, Kykkos carries both histories at once, an object of pilgrimage tied to an unverifiable apostolic legend and, at the very same time, a concrete site in the modern story of how Cyprus became the country it is, connected to the man most responsible for that transition.