According to tradition, the church of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary was founded in 1183, when Angelos Komnenos, the nephew of the Byzantine emperor Andronikos, stole two icons and an Epitaphios (a richly adorned cloth, bearing an image of the dead body of Christ) from a church in Constantinople and brought them in Aitoliko, where he surrendered them to the authorities. The church we see today was built in 1965, when the previous structure was damaged during an earthquake. Despite claims to the contrary, the Epitaphios was made in the 18th century, but it is also connected to an apocryphal story; the aide-de-camp of the Ottoman general Reşid Mehmed Pasha used the Epitaphios as a saddle, but his horse bolted and killed him.