The main road leads only as far as this. In actual fact it is not a monastery, though it contains a large hostel for pilgrims. The buildings form a giant square and are reminiscent of an eastern caravanserai. The Oeconomos, or resident priest, cares for the pilgrims. These number thousands in the year, but congregate chiefly on the feast days of August 15th and November 30th. They bring offerings of valuables and the fruits of their labours or, in cases where a cure is sought, wax effigies of the patient or his afflicted limb. And because the currents of the sea converge offshore, it is not unknown for flagons of oil consigned to the sea at some distant point of the island to be safely delivered, without human agency, near the shrine of the saint.
According to a legend which appears to have originated some time after the Middle Ages, St Andrew was passing the Cape on his return voyage to Palestine when his ship ran out of water. He thereupon counselled the one-eyed captain of his ship to put ashore, and in this seemingly arid region they found water. This when brought aboard cured the captain of his blindness, whereupon his sailors immediately adopted Christianity and were baptized by the saint. On his next voyage the grateful sea-captain erected a shrine near the well where the miracle originated, and set up a costly icon of the saint inside it.
The fifteenth-century Gothic Chapel which houses two of the three wells near the sea-shore is of greater architectural interest than the modern church of the saint. The votive offerings, and in particular the wax models, some of them crude portraits of the sick petitioners, illustrate the powerful belief of the islanders in this holy spot at the most remote corner of their land. Students of history, also, will like to remember that this is where Isaac Comnenus finally surrendered to Richard Coeur de Lion in 1191 after he had failed to procure a ship to carry him abroad.
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| Apostolos Andreas Monastery in North Cyprus - Famagusta Historical Places in Cyprus |
