Church of Saint John the Forerunner

At the heart of the village of Deliana, in the district simply named Prodromos ("the Forerunner") after the church's patron saint, stands a single-nave, barrel-vaulted church from around 1300. The name of the district is no accident: the village itself was originally called Prodromos, before being renamed Deliana. The building was raised on the foundations of an earlier church of the same size — an echo of a history running deeper than what meets the eye today. Even before crossing the threshold, the eye is drawn to a richly carved, late Gothic portal — a work from the era of Venetian Crete, bearing a foundation inscription naming Dominico Venier, a member of a well-known Venetian family. Inside, however, something far more remarkable awaits. The raised western part of the nave is covered by a dense, exceptionally well-preserved programme of the Last Judgement — one of the most extensive and thoroughly documented visions of hell and salvation on all of Crete. Scholars consider the Hell scene at Deliana to be possibly the largest surviving composition of its kind on the island: a procession of the damned marching towards Satan's throne, among them persecuting emperors, treacherous clergy and — a rarity — a figure explicitly labelled as Arius, the 4th-century arch-heretic, together with his followers. On the opposite side of the nave, as a counterweight, Paradise unfolds, with the enthroned Theotokos, the Good Thief, and the souls of the righteous resting in the bosom of the three Patriarchs. These frescoes lay hidden for decades beneath a thick coat of whitewash and were only uncovered at the end of the 20th century during conservation work by the Greek antiquities service — which explains why older publications described this church as "almost entirely destroyed." It was precisely the analysis of the uncovered scenes from the saint's life — Herod's Feast with the dancing Salome, the Beheading, the Head on a Platter — that resolved an old ambiguity about the church's dedication: earlier sources recorded it as a church of Saint John the Theologian (the Evangelist), but the iconography points unambiguously to Saint John the Baptist (the Forerunner). In the eastern, lower-lying part of the nave, the frescoes are far more damaged, though scenes from the Christological cycle remain legible, along with the rarely depicted Dream of Joseph. The conch of the sanctuary apse bears the remains of a Deesis, and below it, the Communion of the Apostles and the Melismos flanked by officiating bishops. The authorship of the paintings is sometimes attributed in popular sources to the workshop of Michael Veneris, though the scholarly catalogue devoted to this church does not confirm this attribution directly — it therefore remains a hypothesis rather than an established fact.