Crete – a History Written in Lime

Crete – an open book written in lime
Crete is an island you can read like a book. Not a neatly bound, glossy new volume, but an old, slightly battered one, with bent pages, moisture stains, and a thin layer of dust. Only here, the pages are the walls of village churches, and the ink is pigment mixed with the painter’s sweat and the dust of lime mortar. Step into any chapel in the mountains and you immediately get a lesson in the history of ordinary people. Not Venetians wrapped in velvet. Not officials of the Serenissima. But Manolis from the village, who has just taken a goat to market and is praying that rain will fall on his vineyard.

And that is the beauty of it: this book is still being written. Because today you also sit with Manolis over coffee at the kafenion, listening to him talk about the grape harvest or how a goat climbed onto his roof and ate the grapes. And suddenly, when you look at a fresco in a rural church, you realize that these are the same stories, only seven hundred years older. Different names, different shoes, same human being.

Take, for instance, a fresco that is absolutely extraordinary: Saint Anne nursing Mary. Yes, nursing. No veils, no polite theological shortcuts pretending children come from the air. Theology? Of course. But more than that, a mirror of everyday life. Every woman in the village knew there was no life without milk. She knew what it meant when a child cried and the breasts were empty. Anne in the apse was more “one of us” than any other saint. She was not distant. She was not from another world. She was a neighbor.

So the church walls spoke the language of real people. Hell? Entirely practical. A thief of olives sizzling in the flames. A sharp-tongued woman suffocating in fire. A cheat who watered down wine being beaten by devils. A manual for life. A local criminal code. You didn’t need to read. You only needed to look. Visual education at its finest.

And who painted all this? Not some romantic artist with a noble beard. A working craftsman. Frescos in one village, roof repairs in another, sleeping in a stable beside a donkey in the third. Traveling on a mule. Pigments mixed by an apprentice who was paid in lentil stew. Painting from sunrise to sundown to finish before the feast day. And in all that labor he left a trace: “διὰ χειρὸς Ἰωάννου” – “by the hand of Ioannis.” Sometimes he’d even sneak a tiny halo into the corner, just to make sure no one forgot who had taught this village what Heaven and Hell look like.

Painters were a bit like freelancers. Today you see a designer with a laptop in a café; back then you saw a painter with brushes in his satchel. Both chronically late, chronically underpaid, both praying for patience from their patron. And yet without them, the book of Crete would be blank.

Above all this hovered the Venetians. Elegant occupiers who tried to uproot Orthodoxy and impose Latin rite. But what could a peasant do when he was more terrified of drought than of a papal decree? Venice could dream of Bellini adorning a chapel. Meanwhile in the mountains of Crete, devils with fangs, saints with crooked noses, and Madonnas who looked suspiciously like the lady from the market were being painted. The frescos became partisan fighters in painted robes – ostensibly sacred art, but in truth a quiet act of resistance.

Then there were the beliefs few like to mention today. Take the frescos with scratched-out eyes. Why? Because people believed that if your eye hurt, you could “borrow” some pigment from a saint. Scrape it gently, mix it with olive oil – and behold, a cure for cataracts. Pharmacy straight from the wall. Saint as physician. A bit of faith, a bit of superstition, a lot of desperation. And there were others: someone scraped pigment from a saint’s hands to “cure rheumatism,” someone kissed the feet of Christ hoping their daughter would finally marry. A fresco was not decoration. It was a tool for living.

And again: you don’t need to travel back in time to understand this. Today you still meet people who have their own ways, their own stories, their own holy places. You sit with them at the table, drink raki, and then walk to a chapel – and you suddenly see that their ancestors asked the same questions seven centuries ago. How do I feed my family? How do I survive the winter? How do I avoid illness? How do I endure an occupation? Frescos don’t lie – they are an open book.

Reading these walls, you see the world of ordinary people. A world where theology mixed with gossip, where the sacred blended with superstition, where painting was not “high art” but a life manual. For us – heritage, “Byzantine-Venetian frescos.” For them – newspaper, horoscope, criminal code, and farmer’s almanac in one.

Crete truly is an open book. But to read it, you must bend down, step into a forgotten chapel, and look at those worn-down walls. And then, between saints and demons, you discover something else: that the person from seven hundred years ago and the person standing there today are the same creature. With the same fear, the same hope, the same desire for life to make sense.

And I’ll be honest – when I stand in such a chapel, in the silence broken only by a creaking door or my camera knocking against the stone, I feel as if I am reading letters from centuries past. Letters not addressed to scholars or rulers, but to me. To an ordinary person who also worries about tomorrow, also searches for signs, also needs to smile or to feel a chill in order to understand that he is alive.

And maybe that is why I keep returning to these walls – because they do not remain silent.
They speak.
Of milk, of goats, of rain, of fear, of hope.
And reading them today, I feel that for a moment I become part of the very same story.