Kritou Marrotou

[Dominic]

There are lots of charming villages in the Paphos Heartlands, between the North and South coasts. Beyond the gaze of many tourists, they are waiting to be discovered and explored. Kritou Marottou is a fine example, and can be found on the upper banks of the Ezousa Valley, above the village of Kannaviou.

Read the article and chat about it below...
 

kritou_marottou_masthead.jpg (171.86 KiB) Viewed 1096 times

[LouiseCastricum]

Sorry Dominic can't go to second page, keeps coming back at page 1.

[Dominic]

Try it now.

[josef k]

Seems to work fine. A good tour round a well tended village.

[CanadaNatasha22]

Loved this blog! Looking forward to visiting the village sometime soon.

According to Eleftherios Tserkezis (BA Classics, MA Byzantine History) on Quora the painting is of Ayia Marina, who is traditionally depicted manhandling the devil or striking him with a hammer. He goes on to say “Notice how the devil is depicted small, misshapen, weak, ugly and wholly unimpressive. That’s in accordance with the standard Byzantine / Orthodox perception of things. Far from being the romanticized, sensational Prince of Darkness the West has been accustomed to, the Eastern devil is seedy, pathetic, even pitiful."

I had no idea about the difference between the Eastern and Western perceptions of "the devil", and I'm really happy that I found this little nugget.

[Dominic]

Nice bit of research. Thanks!

I like the idea of portraying the Devil as a pathetic figure too.

[Dominic]

Seems to work fine. A good tour round a well tended village.

There was a bug which meant no blogs were displaying past Page 1. Basically, I was trying to reduce the error log to zero again. Since upgrading the site with a new version of Linux and PHP, bugs have appeared. They didn't used to be bugs, but under the newer PHP what was once acceptable is now unacceptable. In this case, you used to be able to let PHP decide whether a string was actually a number. So in the old days, "2" + 2 would equal 4. Now it doesn't. This caused a bug in the page-numbering routine. I thought I fixed it, but my fix meant that all page numbers would be treated as 1, so if you went to the next page it would serve up page 1 again. While it cleared the error it made it functionally useless for anybody who reads past page 1. And as we all know, the good stuff usually starts on Page 2.