The Orthodox Civilization – The Island’s Story

The island of the rising sun – that is how sailors might once have named it as they passed the towering cliffs of Sfakia. At dawn, when the light burned the eyes, Crete looked like a place not entirely of this world: defenseless and yet strangely impervious to anything that came from the sea. And it was precisely in this seeming contradiction – fragility and stubbornness – that the Orthodox civilization rooted itself, the world of the Eastern Church whose voice, sometimes whispered from behind the iconostasis, survived everything history hurled at the island.

That history never unfolded linearly. It resembled a palimpsest of fresco layers – beneath the newest pigment older strata shone through, like ancestral shadows flickering in the light of an olive lamp. Every empire tried to impose its own colors, accents, gestures, and laws on Crete. But the moment it touched the wall, the pigment of earlier centuries bled through its fingertips. Byzantium, Venice, the Ottomans – they shifted borders, collected taxes, issued decrees and prohibitions – but they never managed to alter what the island’s religion was. It had settled too deeply: in the rock, in the people, in daily life.

The beginnings were elusive, like the morning mist rising above the plain of Messara. You can stand on a hill in Kandanos or on the plateau around Omalos and try to imagine the first wandering monk arriving with an icon wrapped in linen. The rocks must have been as cold as they are today, and the path as winding. The rest – silence, prayer, a handful of voices gathering around a barely planed wooden cross – must have felt as breakable as an eggshell. And yet from that fragility emerged a strength that no empire could later break.

Byzantine Crete lived at the periphery, yet spiritually belonged to the world that created Pantokrators in the domes of Ravenna, Constantinople, and Dafni. The same light, the same metaphysical gravity permeated the first layers of plaster, the first painted attempts, the early chapels built from raw, unhewn stone. The oldest churches – Agios Georgios in Komitades, Agios Nikolaos in Kyriakoselia, dozens of tiny chapels hidden in Selino and Mylopotamos – did not yet have impressive iconographic cycles. Their interiors were almost bare, as if reserved for something still to come. But the apses, semicircular and tentative, the simple naves and early attempts at domed layouts already carried the awareness: this is not to be an ordinary place. This is sacred space.

An icon was not an object here. An icon was a person, a witness, a presence. Anyone who does not grasp this will never understand Crete.

Then Venice arrived, with its Latin self-assurance, its gleaming processions, its bishops dressed in garments unfamiliar to the local people, with a hierarchy as hard and cold as the marble of the Doge’s Palace. The Venetians assumed they could repaint the island – impose order, elegance, the Western rite – and that Crete would kneel before a new liturgy. They misjudged only one thing: the painters. Precisely at the moment when old practices were being forbidden and replaced with Latin ones, new fresco cycles began to emerge in the mountains of Selino, in Kandanos, in remote villages. Frescoes so powerful that even today it is difficult to look at them without a shiver. Pagomenos and his collaborators travelled from village to village with brushes, pigments, and a deep sense of duty. They did not paint for beauty – they painted for truth. For the people. For memory.

This is how the frescoes of Agios Ioannis in Trachiniakos, Agios Georgios in Anisaraki, and countless other churches came into being – buildings that still stand, though time has robbed them of half their colors. Pagomenos’ style was rough, forceful, unmistakable: figures that seem to grow out of the wall, eyes brimming with a depth words cannot express. He was not decorating. He was witnessing. Each fresco was a declaration of Orthodox existence at a time when attempts were being made to silence it.

The Ottomans who came later inherited an island full of fresh traces of this visual theology. Their administration created a framework in which the Church became an intermediary between state and people. In many places it was the only institution with any continuity. That is why monasteries naturally became centers of revolt and refuge. Weapons were hidden there, children taught there, the first sparks of rebellion planned there. Iconography survived, sometimes simplified, sometimes the work of anonymous masters, but always alive. Even when the pigment was cheap and the plaster fragile, the eyes of the saints still burned with the same inner light.

Against this background stands the figure who unexpectedly brought Crete into the history of global art. Dominikos Theotokopoulos – El Greco – left the island as a young icon painter from Heraklion. He painted as he had been taught: sharply, spiritually, with elongated faces and hands, because iconography always stretches what is spiritual and compresses what is earthly. He grew up in a world where light did not come from a lamp but from within the figure; where color was a metaphysical sign, not decoration. When he arrived in Venice, he did not discard that tradition – he carried it within him like a second skeleton.

In Rome he tried to find a common language with the Renaissance ideal of beauty, but his soul remained Orthodox. Only in Toledo did he finally become himself: an artist who fused what had been born in the icons of Crete with what he had learned in Italy. One glance at “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz” is enough to see two civilizations pulsating in a single composition. The lower part – with its realistic portraits – is Western. The upper part – with the elongated saints and source-less light – is purely Byzantine, purely Cretan. El Greco brought to the West something the West did not understand: that artistic truth can be expressed not through realism, but through intensity.

When Europe later rediscovered his work, it saw in him a precursor of expressionism, a mystic, a visionary. And yet his vision came from this island. From icons. From frescoes. From a tradition that neither Venice nor the Ottomans managed to break.

And so today, when you stand inside a dim church in Meskla, in Selino, in Kritsa, you sense that everything weaves into a single story. Fourteenth-century frescoes, damaged but still alive. Icons that still shine as if the feast had been yesterday. Simple single-nave architecture that has endured centuries. And that certainty that this religion was never imposed – it was organic. It grew from the soil like an olive tree.

Crete survived so many empires because what mattered most was already inside. The icon was its memory, its language, its light. And as long as the eyes on its walls look at people the same way they did seven centuries ago, the island will keep speaking in its own voice – the voice of the Orthodoxy that became its foundation.