Patrick Comerford
Over the past week or so, I have been going through old photographs of and postings about churches, chapels and monasteries in Crete and throughout Greece, trying to put together a guide to those churches and church sites I have visited, similar to those I have compiled for churches in Milton Keynes and Buckingham, Lichfield and Staffordshire, Oxford, Wexford, Limerick and Dublin.
I have been a frequent visitor to Greece for almost 40 years, since the late 1980s, when I first stayed in Rethymnon.
As my list of Greek churches, cathedral, chapels and monasteries grows, I am surprised how many churches and church sites I have visited, and as I compile the guide the number has already grown to more than 130, of which almost 80 are in Crete alone. But I am also taken aback by the number of churches I have visited in Greece but never blogged about or have lost photographs of.
Although I wrote a now-lost feature as a guide to the cathedrals and churches of Athens to mark the Athens Olympics in 2004, all those notes and photographs seem to have been lost on old laptops or on memory sticks that no longer seem to remember anything. Gone too are my photographs from my journeys throughout the Peloponnese and past visits to many islands on working trips and family holidays, including Halki, Ikaria, Kalymnos, Kephallonia, Kos, Patmos, Pserimos, Rhodes, Samos, Santorini and Zakynthos.
But, as I was going through those photographs and blog postings over the past week or so, I also came across photographs of a church in Iraklion that I have noticed during recent stopovers when I have spent Easter weeks in Rethymnon and visited friends in Piskopiano or had dinner with old friends in Iraklion, and two other chapels that I had visited suring teks across the mountains from Rethymnon to the Monastery of Preveli on the south coast of Crete.
I have known Iraklion throughout all those 40 years since the 1980s. The old KTEL bus station was moved a few years ago from beneath the old Megaron Hotel about 200 metres east and a bit inland. The main bus station in Iraklion now stands on Ikarou Avenue, where it serves the long-distance intercity buses on routes along the north coast of Crete, including buses to Chania and Rethymnon to the west and Hersonissos and Agios Nikolaos to the east.
Without that move, Ikarou Avenue may have remained a back street in Iraklion and I might never have noticed the small 130-year-old Catholic chapel on Ikarou Avenue. The Chapel of the Holy Cross is at the old Catholic cemetery, close to the KTEL bus station and on a side road off Efesou Road.
The Chapel of the Holy Cross (Παρεκκλήσιο Τίμιος Σταυρός) was a built in 1893, five years before the expulsion of the Ottoman Turks in 1898 and the formation of an autonomous Cretan State headed by Prince George of Greece and Denmark. Crete was not fully incorporated into the modern Greek state until 1906, and this was not recognised internationally until 1913.
In the past, during Venetian rule, Iraklion had many Catholic churches, including Saint Mark’s Cathedral in the heart of the city or prominent monastic churches such as the Dominican Church of Saint Peter.
Pope Alexander V is the only Pope to have been born a Catholic in Crete. He was born Peter Phillarges (Πέτρος Φιλάργης) near modern Neapoli in 1339, under Venetian rule, and became a Franciscan. He was pope from 1409 to 1410, but is now regarded as an antipope.
The Catholic Diocese of Crete was re-established as a bishopric in 1874, initially as a suffragan of the Archbishop of İzmir. Today, the Bishop of Crete is a suffragan of the Archbishop of Naxos, Andros, Tinos and Mykonos, the Catholic cathedral is in Chania, and there are Catholic churches in Crete in Iraklion, Chania and Rethymnon.
The small, pre-independence Chapel of the Holy Cross near the new KTEL bus station was built at the entrance to old Catholic cemetery in Iraklion in 1893 by Italian priests serving the small remaining Catholic community in Iraklion.
Today, the main Catholic church in Iraklion is the Church of Saint John the Baptist at Antoniou Patros, near the old port. The church was first built in 1888. The church was severely damaged in the earthquake in 1959 and had to be demolished and rebuilt.There has been a long presence of Capuchin Franciscans in Crete and the pastor at that time, Father George Roussos, built the present church in 1961-1962. Father Petros Roussos, who was the pastor from 1980 to 2008, also refurbished the Capuchin monastery next to the church.
Despite its small size, the church has mass in six different languages and welcomes everyone to coffee afterwards. Daily Mass is usually in the evening, while the Sunday morning Masses are often multilingual to meet the needs of both tourists and expats.
Plaques on the wall of the Chapel of the Holy Cross recall the work of Father George Roussos and Father Petros Roussos in restoring the building. Today, the chapel is primarily a resting place for funerals in the old Catholic cemetery and it is seldom used for the celebration of public Masses. But I may never have noticed this chapel if the main KTEL station in Iraklion had not been moved a few hundred metres a few years ago.
As for that catalogue or index of the churches I have visited in Crete and throughout Greece over the past 40 years, I hope to have that ready within the next few days, as well as some of those other churches, chapels and monasteries that I have found in photographs that I thought I had lost.
