About the project

A statement of intent — where this project came from and why it looks the way it does.

This site was not born from a need to systematise the world, nor from an ambition to "tell the story of Greece". It was born from a fascination that got out of hand. From a need to understand a place that resists easy description — and a culture that was forced for centuries to speak in borrowed tongues, yet kept its own.

Greece, and Crete in particular, is not for me a travel destination or a postcard landscape. It is a space of tensions: between East and West, between Byzantium and Venice, between Christianity and Islam, between memory and forgetting. An island that was Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Ottoman — and each time had to answer from scratch the question of who it actually was.

In that history, religion was not an ornament but a structure of meaning. Not because "everyone believed", but because in a world without a state, without institutional continuity and without political agency, it was religion that held memory together. Icons, frescoes, churches and liturgy were not only expressions of faith but also a form of resistance, a record of continuity, a language of identity.

And here comes the difficult part.

I am not a believer. I do not write from inside religion and I have no intention of pretending otherwise. This project is not a confession of faith, an attempt at conversion, or an aesthetic rapture over "spirituality". And yet I believe it is impossible to write honestly about frescoes, icons, and churches without reaching into the religious context. Without the Bible, without the liturgy, without theology, without understanding what an image meant to those people.

To separate religion from iconography is as sterile as to tell the history of Crete without occupation, violence, and imposed otherness. One can do it, but the result is hollow.

So what I am trying to do here is not believing, but translating. An attempt to understand a world in which religion was the language of meaning — and to render that language into a story intelligible to the contemporary reader who need not share that faith.

In some sense this is not entirely unfamiliar territory for me. I grew up in the Polish Podlasie, a place where cultures, languages, and religions converge, where Orthodoxy is genuinely present rather than exotic. There the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy is not an abstract theological dispute but something visible in architecture, in the iconostasis, in the rhythm of feast days and in the way people think about time. That experience makes it much easier to look at Crete without simplifications — and without romantic clichés.

Greek Orthodoxy is not the same as the Orthodoxy familiar from Poland or Ukraine. The landscape is different, the relationship with history is different, the experience of occupation and resistance is different. But the mechanism is similar: religion as a vehicle of memory, and the icon as something more than an image.

Hence my interest in iconography — not as "sacred art" but as a system of meanings. The icon in the Orthodox world is not decoration or illustration. It is a theological statement, a record of interpretation, a form of thinking through image. Without biblical literacy it remains unintelligible; without history it is unmoored from reality; without liturgical context it is dead.

Crete occupies a particular place in all of this. It is here that the Cretan School of iconography emerged, operating at the intersection of the Byzantine and Venetian worlds. It is from here that El Greco came — a figure who shows better than any other how simplified the narrative of "Western" art history tends to be. His painting does not begin in Spain. It begins in Crete, in the world of icons, canon, and the theology of the image.

And then there are specific people. People like Ioannis Pagomenos — a fresco painter whose traces can today be found in small, often forgotten churches, far from tourist routes. Following his trail is not a reconstruction of a biography, but an attempt to understand the conditions of work, the thinking, and the language of images he left behind.

This project has no ambition to be a complete catalogue or a guidebook. It is an attempt to preserve something that is disappearing: frescoes decaying in silence, churches locked shut, stories written on walls that fewer and fewer people read. It is a modest attempt to rescue a heritage — not through conservation, which is beyond my reach, but through attentive looking and storytelling.

If you have found your way here, I expect neither agreement nor shared convictions. Curiosity is enough, and a willingness to step for a moment into a world where an image was a language and religion was a tool of survival. The rest will happen, or it won't. And that, too, is fine.