Guide of Eastern Macedonia & Thrace

The valley of the “Irinis Rema” river that flows from NW to SE and empties into the Aegean Sea is located north of Alexandroupolis and west of Avas in the area of Mount Zonaio.
The valley of “Irinis Rema” (In dere, in Turkish) is linked with a smaller sided valley leading to precipitous cliffs, most of them forming caves. In one of these caves, on the top of a large cavity, the rock-cut church of St Theodores was fashioned. The walls and the embedded into the rock iconostasis of the church are richly decorated with Byzantine wall paintings created in two phases. In the first phase of the late 11th century, the paintings were elaborated with the characteristic features of the so-called “monastic” tradition dominated by the intense linear forms, the schematic representations, the lack of volume, the frontality and the austere figures. The second phase dating to the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th centuries is characterized by the style of the so-called “transition period”, the linear “Comnenean” and the more idealistic, anthropocentric “Paleologian” painting. The small church with the built iconostasis and the wall paintings on the surface of the rocks resembles the cavernous churches of Cappadocia.