Church of the Archangel Michael

This small, round church, tucked away on a hillside above the village of Kato Episkopi, is an architectural one-of-a-kind — the only surviving centrally-planned, domed building on all of Crete, raised back in the 6th century. From the outside the building looks almost unassuming, rectangular, but one glance at the dome gives the game away: five concentric rings, each stepping inward, a silhouette with no real match anywhere else in the island's Byzantine architecture. The closest cousin is the famous Rotunda of Thessaloniki. The interior holds an equally rare find: fragments of a mosaic floor from the second half of the 6th century, decorated with olive leaves, vine tendrils and fish — one of the few surviving examples of early Byzantine floor mosaic in western Crete. In the narthex and an adjoining side room, two baptismal fonts have also survived, one of them cross-shaped and set right into the floor — evidence that the building doubled as a baptistery, a place where the early Christians of the region were baptised. But what's really fascinating is what the walls have been hiding: five layers of painting, one on top of the other, laid down over more than seven hundred years. The oldest, from the 7th century, includes the Ascension in the dome and a figure of Saint George whose style echoes the early Byzantine mosaics of the Basilica of St. Demetrios in Thessaloniki — one of the most valuable pieces of monumental painting from that era anywhere on the island. The next layer bears the mark of the turbulent Iconoclastic period — instead of holy figures, the painters left only decorative crosses, since depicting images was forbidden at the time. When the veneration of icons was restored, the frescoes were repainted in the 12th century, producing one of the finest examples of Komnenian-era painting on Crete. The final touches, from the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, are attributed to the workshop of the well-known Cretan painter Michael Veneris. This was no ordinary village church — for centuries it served as the cathedral of the diocese of Kisamos, after the episcopal seat was moved inland (hence the village's name, Episkopi — "bishopric"). Traces of the bishop's residence from the Ottoman period survive in the western part of the complex. It was from here, too, that Bishop Melchizedek Despotakis of Kisamos hailed — a member of the Greek independence movement, hanged by the Turks in 1821 in Splantzia square in Chania.