On a small rocky hill, on the edge of the city’s external walls, north of the Basilica of Servia and west of St John the Baptist, stands the church of Agioi Theodoroi. Although it was part of a functional monastic complex, the church of Agioi Theodoroi is a tiny single-space church (internal dimensions only 4.10 x 2.42 m), covered by a wooden gable roof, with a high semicircular niche in the east. The church has been identified with the katholikon of the female monastery of Agioi Theodoroi, mentioned in the sources as early as the 13th century as a stauropegion. The monastery is also referred to as the monastery ‘of Sideris’ or simply ‘Kalogries’ (Nuns) and was, at least in the Ottoman period, an annex of the male monastery of Agioi Theodoroi Kastania Servia. Only part of the churchyard and a vaulted tank from the monastery complex are preserved today.
Rich brick ornamentation decorates all sides of the monument, with bricks forming letters and combinations of letters (K, X, P, T, KN, KB, inverted K, Christogram, etc.) and simple geometric shapes. The morphological characteristics of the church link it to buildings from the second half of the 11th century, although the wall paintings appear to be much younger. In fact, there is an inscription that still survives in the north-east corner of the church, which refers only to its painted decoration and not to its construction; we learn that the church was frescoed with the assistance of many laymen (the names of at least six families are mentioned) and a priest and his wife. The name of Demetrios listed in the inscription could perhaps be identified with painter Demetrios, who is mentioned as the painter of the church in the 1872 issue of Pandora journal. The inscription, however, does not refer to the use of the church as a catholikon or a monastery annex, which reinforces the doubts expressed by Andreas Xygopoulos about the capacity of this particular building to function as a catholikon of a stauropegic monastery because of its ‘miniature size’.
The part of the inscription where the year of the church’s decoration was mentioned is tough to read today. Xygopoulos managed to distinguish only the indiction and not the year of the decoration. Taking into account the stylistic characteristics of the wall paintings and especially the iconographic and stylistic affinity with the paintings in the old catholicon of the Transfiguration Monastery of Meteora, a work of 1483, Xygopoulos was led to dating Agioi Theodoroi’s wall paintings towards the end of the 15th century or the beginning of the 16th. Indeed, the painting of Agioi Theodoroi bears significant similarities with works of the so-called “Kastorian workshop,” which was active in the broader region of Meteora and Macedonia in the last two decades of the 15th and the first decade of the 16th century. Given that the 15th indiction coincides with the years 1497 and 1512, Xygopoulos proposed 1497 as the year of the inscription, which was also adopted by all later literature. However, a closer observation of the inscription reveals that the year ˏζκ΄, i.e., the year 1512, is written with faint characters next to the indiction.
The iconographic program of the church is developed in three superimposed zones of varying heights, including scenes of the Twelve Great Feasts in the upper zone, saints and prophets in medallions in the middle zone, and full-length saints in the lower zone.
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The creation of this website is part of the implementation of the Act “Consolidation and Restoration of the Western Tower of the Castle of Servia,” which was implemented by the Ephorate of Antiquities of Kozani and co-funded by Greece and the European Union / European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme “Western Macedonia” of the NSRF 2014-2020.