The church of the Taxiarchis (Archangel) of the Metropolis, a small triple-aisled basilica with narthex, is of 10th century construction. Its considerable interest lies equally in its antiquity and in its original wall-paintings.
While they have deteriorated through age, these paintings are of importance to the study of art in the Middle Byzantine period. The old murals were painted over in 1359/60, the more recent being the ones most visible today.
These later murals display their own characteristic techniques that do not follow the rules governing painting as formulated at the time in the large urban centres of Byzantium. From then on a local painting workshop existed in Kastoria; it was inspired by locally conceived aesthetic canons and persisted until the first years of the 16th century.
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