Panagia Episkopi

This guide to Panagia Episkopi in Santorini follows the faint shapes still bleeding through the plaster near the dome, painted over sometime under Ottoman rule and left unexplained for generations. It traces how twentieth-century Byzantinist Anastasios Orlandos treated the flaking walls as evidence, matching surfaced brushwork to murals in the rock churches of Cappadocia to work out how old this parish church really is. The church survived a fire in 1915 and a long earthquake repair stretching through 1956, though three stolen fresco fragments from its walls have never been recovered.