Field notes and essays on the churches of Crete: their frescoes, painters, inscriptions and the people around them.
Tag: iconography · clear filter
Just a dozen or so metres from my bed, the little church of Agios Athanasios has stood there for years — with hell labelled like a road sign, sinners bitten by snakes, and Ossia Maria, after whom the Samaria Gorge takes its name.
At the edge of an oak forest near Drakona stands a church so small that it would be easy to take it for an unremarkable roadside chapel. And yet, in its faded frescoes, a rare story of Saint Stephen, the first martyr of Christianity, has survived — together with a trace of a world in which Byzantine Crete met the West.
In the catalogue
Amid the citrus groves of the Chania plain stands a church that does not announce itself from a distance. You need to know what you are looking for. It is worth the effort — beneath its floor lie children, on its walls lives John the Stranger, and the dedication to the Life-Giving Spring carries a weight here that it carries nowhere else.
In the catalogue
On the edge of a mountain village near Chania stands a small church that is easy to miss. And yet its frescoes are not merely decoration. They lead the visitor through a story of light, death, repentance and hope.
In the catalogue