Church of Saint Anne

Location: Anisaraki, municipality of Kandanos-Selino, approximately 58 km south of Chania, at an altitude of 520 m. The church stands at the entrance to the village and is signposted by the archaeological service. Architecture: A small, single-nave church with a barrel vault reinforced by a sling arch (σφενδόνιο). Austere on the outside — two blind arcades in the north and south walls widen the interior, which does not exceed 20 m². The building belongs to the common Venetian-era Cretan type of rural chapel, but stands out for possessing one of the very few surviving built, painted altar screens on the island (χτιστό, γραπτό τέμπλο). Wall paintings: Executed by two painters from the school or circle of Ioannis Pagomenos — a fourteenth-century artist whose signed works survive in a dozen or so churches of western Crete. The more skilled of the two was responsible for the altar screen and the sanctuary; the painter of a more vernacular character handled the cycle of Saint Anna and the Galaktotrophousa fresco. Date of execution: 1352, though for decades the years 1457 or 1462 were accepted, based on a misreading of the founders' inscription. A new reading using infrared photography and palaeographic analysis established that the last two lines of the inscription had been erased and rewritten five years later in order to add a new donor — hence the confusion. Founders' inscription names nine donors — three married couples and three men. Among them a priest, Ioannis, with his wife, and two young men, Nikolaos and Basileios. All are depicted in prayer at the entrance to the church, dressed in a manner that reflects local social standing. The women's costumes — with double-headed eagles embroidered on their outer mantles — make a deliberate statement of Byzantine identity under Venetian rule. Iconographic programme: Unique on the scale of the entire island of Crete. The western half of the vault is given over entirely to the childhood of the Virgin Mary, from her birth to the Presentation in the Temple — seven scenes with no interruption for Gospel subjects (the sole exception being a Crucifixion in the tympanum of the western wall). Against this background, Anna is elevated as the absolute protagonist: she is the centre of every scene, not Mary. Even the inscriptions accompanying the paintings are unconventional: the scene usually called the Nativity of the Virgin carries here the title Η ΓΕΝΗΣΙΣ ΤΗΣ ΑΝΗΣ — the Birth of Anne — while the exile of Joachim bears the title Η ΕΞΟΡΙΑ ΤΟΥ ΙΩΑΚΕΙΜ, a formula unattested elsewhere in monumental painting. The fresco of Anna Galaktotrophousa — Anna nursing the infant Mary — is placed low on the north wall, opposite the Christ Pantocrator. The subject is exceptionally rare in the entire Byzantine tradition: only five such frescoes are known to survive. Anna is shown in three-quarter view, in a red maphorion, with Mary lying horizontally in her arms — an iconographic novelty; the child is not seated but recumbent, peacefully nursing. Anna's eyes have been deliberately scratched out at some point in the past. In the same church Anna appears twice more: as Vrephokratousa (holding the infant) on the altar screen, and in the same role on the external relieving arch above the entrance — three depictions in all within a single small chapel, an exceptional concentration unparalleled in Greece. Context: Anisaraki lies at the heart of the Selino region, an area of extraordinary density of surviving painted churches. Within a few kilometres one can visit the churches of the Panagia and of Saint George in the same village, the churches of Kandanos itself, and within a wider radius dozens of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chapels. The church of Saint Anna is regarded as the most important Byzantine monument in the entire municipality.