Church of the Parigoritissa

The Panagia Parigoritissa, built around 1290 by the rulers of the Despotate of Epirus, is the most architecturally daring Byzantine church in mainland Greece. From the outside it looks like a tall, almost cubic brick block; inside, a single soaring dome rests on an improbable stack of columns and brackets that seems too slender for the load it carries.

The dome itself is filled with a magnificent mosaic of Christ Pantokrator, surrounded by prophets — one of the finest late Byzantine mosaics anywhere outside Constantinople and Thessaloniki. The church sits on the small Plateia Skoufa in the centre of town, and you can usually walk straight in. A small museum of Byzantine sculpture occupies adjoining rooms of the former monastery.

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To get the wide central dome to sit on such a narrow plan, the thirteenth-century builders stacked columns on top of columns using cantilevered brackets — an arrangement so unusual that visiting Byzantinists have argued about it for over a century. From below it looks half like a building and half like a clever piece of furniture.

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