Kykkos Icon of the Virgin Mary

The Kykkos Icon of the Virgin Mary, Panagia tou Kykkou, has spent centuries being simultaneously the most venerated object in the Church of Cyprus and one almost nobody has actually looked at directly. Its upper half has remained covered behind a protective tissue since at least the seventeenth century, and the last recorded occasion on which anyone viewed it fully was in 1669, when the Patriarch of Alexandria was permitted to do so. Popular belief holds that viewing the icon directly causes blindness, a tradition that has kept it veiled through the centuries since even as its reputation for miraculous intercession, including relief credited to it from a locust plague in 1760, has only grown.

Church tradition attributes the icon's painting to the Evangelist Luke himself, one of only three icons Orthodox tradition credits to Luke's own hand, and holds that it was later transferred from Constantinople to Cyprus and installed at the monastery founded around the end of the eleventh century under the patronage of the Byzantine emperor Alexios Komnenos. That attribution is devotional tradition passed down through pilgrim accounts rather than a claim independent art history can verify, and the icon's actual date and manner of production are not otherwise established by any evidence apart from the tradition itself, a limitation worth stating plainly given how central the Luke attribution is to how the icon is venerated.

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.