AGIOS NIKOLAOS -Triada - 2000

Agios Nikolaos, Triada. D. Athanasoulis (6th EBA) reports on excavation to locate the remains of this church, northeast of the village of Triada and 1km east of the Middle Byzantine Church of the Panagia at Zourtsa (Nea Phigaleia), undertaken in response to a local request to build a new church on the site.

The cruciform building was decorated with wallpaintings of which only traces survive. Around it and especially under the stone-paved floor were many cursorily-built graves (local inhabitants also report the discovery of tombs during the ploughing of neighbouring fields). Tombs were revealed outside the southeast corner of the building and in the south transept (under the floor along the south wall) during the initial earth-moving which led to the involvement of the 6th EBA, confirming the use of the site as a cemetery after the destruction of the church. Fourteen tombs were found during the excavation, half inside the church and half out, with a further five at least found by local inhabitants. Burials were made inside the church wherever the generally high bedrock allowed: the deceased were laid, head to the west, in natural depressions in the rock which were sometimes artificially enhanced, with rough cover slabs set over them. Limitations of space meant that interior burials overlapped. One child burial was found in the centre of the building. There are a few exceptions to the general lack of grave goods: a bronze fibula (tomb 8), iron shoe heels (tomb 13) and a small closed pot with incised decoration (tomb 14). In one case the face of the deceased was covered with a tile. Portable finds from the excavation are few: fragments of glass vessels and of bronze sheet from lamp handles and three coins (an aspron trachy of John II Comnenos from the mint of Thessaloniki, an imitation denier tournois and a Venetian colonial lira). A more recent inscribed grave stele was found close to the church.