Monastery of Saints Peter and Paul

The monastery lies on the Spatha (Rodopos) peninsula, some 40 kilometres north-west of Chania and 12.5 kilometres from the village of Rodopos — accessible only via a rough dirt road. Together with the monastery of Saint John at Gionas, a few kilometres further north, it formed a single monastic complex that flourished during the late Venetian period. After the Ottoman conquest both monasteries became dependencies of the powerful Gonia monastery at Kolimbari. The complex does not appear in the census of churches and monasteries from 1637, and evidence for its history is sparse. The catholicon — a single-nave church with a dome clad in Byzantine ceramic tiles — preserves two phases of wall painting. The older, covering the eastern part, dates to the end of the 14th century and is the work of an anonymous folk painter working in the tradition of the Macedonian school. The younger, in the western extension, dates to the mid-15th century — a more accomplished craftsman who painted full-length saints and scenes from the Evangelical cycle. The frescoes have been seriously damaged by time, moisture, and salt air. The monastery's isolation has produced an exceptional historical record: 66 graffiti carved into the plaster between 1514 and 1608 — notes left by sailors, merchants, Venetian officials, and pilgrims, in Greek and Italian. Among them: the Venetian chancellor Georgios Gavalàs visited in 1545; in 1553 a certain Manuel Skoutariotis wrote that he had wished to visit the church of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul; a graffito from 1607 records Nikolaos Priouli, doctor of law, with forty companions. The corpus of these inscriptions was published by Dimitris Tsougarakis in Syntagma Charagmaton (Athens 2015).