Cossoine, Church of Santa Maria Iscalas

In the area where the Byzantine church of Santa Maria Iscalas is located, the human presence has been witnessed since ancient times by numerous hypogeic necropolises from the recent Neolithic, among which that of Furrighesos stands out, as well as by the remains of the Nuragic settlement in the town of Santu Pedru, which was also inhabited in Roman and late ancient times.
The church of Santa Maria Iscalas is located in a site with a strong landscape impact, rich in outcrops of white limestone rocks, echoed by the building material of the church, in contrast to the surrounding greenery. There is no agreement on the time of its construction among scholars, who have proposed dates between the 6th-7th and the 10th-11th centuries.
The plant has a free cross. The arms of the cross measure 9 m and end with straight walls except in prospectus E where an apse opens with a cross-shaped window. At the intersection of the arms, a tiburium covered by a pyramidal roof rises. In the era following the cruciform system, a rectangular building with an E-shaped apse was placed against O, in the center of which a trumpeted monophore with smooth grips reopens.
The wall walls are characterized by the use of large ashlars in white or blue-colored limestone, positioned interlocking to form the corners, thus with a clear static function, while the infill wall mirrors are made with freshly drafted ashlars superimposed today with originally dry mortar.
Despite its small size, the building shows executive skill mainly for the external stereometry and the sharpness of the volumes as in the underlining given by the protrusions of the frames and the terminals of the roofs, and for the grouped appearance of the masses around the central body.
At the crossing point between the barrel-shaped arms, the dome is set up, which, contrary to the situation verifiable in most of the other cruciform buildings in Sardinia, does not emerge from the tiburium and is visible only from the inside. From a technical point of view, the dome is hemispherical and is connected to the square by means of angular plumes that connect the base circumference of the dome to the corners at the intersection of the arms of the cross.
Inside the church, fragments of medieval wall paintings are preserved, depicting, among other things, the Baptism of Christ.

History of studies
The church was studied in the middle of the 20th century by Raphael Delogu, who ascribed it to the full Byzantine age. Subsequently, Maria Chiara Satta proposed that it be brought forward to the Early Byzantine Age.

Bibliography by
R. Delogu, The Architecture of the Middle Ages in Sardinia, Rome, The State Library, 1953, pp. 34-35;
M.C. Satta, “Cossoine, Locality of Santa Maria Iscalas, Pre-Romanesque Church”, in The Suburb of Cities in Sardinia: Persistences and Transformations. Proceedings of the III Conference on Studies on Late Roman and Early Medieval Archaeology in Sardinia, Taranto, 1989, pp. 41-44; R. Coroneo-M.
Coppola, Byzantine Cruciform Churches of Sardinia, Cagliari, 1999, pp. 49 51;
R. Coroneo, Romanesque Churches of Sardinia. Tourist-cultural itineraries, Cagliari, AV, 2005, pp. 55-56.

How to get
There From the SS 131, at the height of Bonorva, take the SS 292 bis and reach the town of Cossoine. From here, take an asphalted municipal road for about 8 km to the church, which is located on a rural plateau outside the town.