The most obvious place to start a tour is the landmark church of Ayios Lazaros (daily: April-Aug 8am-12.30pm & 3.30-6.30pm; Sept-March 8am-12.30pm & 2.30-5pm). Poised between the former Turkish and bazaar quarters, it was erected late in the ninth century to house the remains of Lazarus, fortuitously discovered here. The church is distinguished by its graceful Latinate belfry, part of a thorough seventeenth-century overhaul and a miraculous survival of Turkish rule; the Ottomans usually forbade the raising of such structures, considering their height a challenging insult to the minarets of Islam, and (more practically) fearing they would be used to proclaim insurrection. Indeed the church had to be ransomed from the Turks in 1589, and was used for joint worship by Roman Catholics and Orthodox for two centuries after -as evidenced by Greek, Latin and French inscriptions in the Gothic-influenced portico, in addition to the earlier Byzantine and Lusignan coats-of-arms near the main south door.
The spare stone interior (consequence of a fire in 1970) is a relief after the busy decoration of many Cypriot churches. Three small domes are supported on four pillars slit into doublets, with narrow arches springing from wedged-in Corinthian capitals. The celebrated carved temblon (altar screen), pardy restored after the fire, and a Rococo pulpit on one pillar (for Latin use) are some three hundred years old; on another pillar hangs a filigreed icon of Lazarus emerging from his tomb, an image reverendy paraded in the presence of the bishop of Kition every Easter Saturday evening.
The low-ceilinged crypt under the altar supposedly housed the relics of Lazarus only very briefly -they were taken to Constantinople by the Byzan- tine emperor Leo VI in 901, whence they were stolen, turning up later in Marseilles. But his purported tomb eventually for art of a catacomb of general use, as witness several sarcophagi lying about here. In the northeast corner of the outside compound are more graves in a gated but usually open enclosure -this time of foreign consuls, merchants and family members who died in Larnaca's unhealthy climate during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
