This church, dedicated to Saint Nicholas, cannot be identified with certainty with any one of the monuments of Thessalonike mentioned in the sources. The saint's attribute "of the Orphans" may be a reference to the protection he extended to widows and orphans.
It is the decoration that stands out in this humble, single-aisled, timber-roofed church with its covered colonnade. Dating to the decade 1310-20, the wall-paintings comprise many iconographic cycles and include many individual scenes, as if they were portable icons.
Executed in the spirit peculiar to advanced Palaeologan art, they are a typical example of the painting of that decade (1310-20), which affected artistic expression in the hinterland of Macedonia and in the Serbian state.
An important aspect is the capacity for expression possessed by this honest and emotionally straightforward art that knows how to transmit the mysteries of a complex theological concept to the wall surface through the medium of pigments.
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