Spirituality

The spirituality in question, as it functioned in Crete and the Byzantine world, was neither private nor introspective. It was not an “inner experience” in the modern sense. It was a way of organizing reality—of thinking about time, space, the body, and history in terms that extended beyond everyday functionality.

In this world, spirituality did not exist alongside life; it was embedded within it. The rhythm of the day and the year was shaped by liturgy, images ordered space, and the biblical text conferred meaning on events that might otherwise have appeared chaotic. The focus was not on emotions or individual experience, but on participation in an order that was shared and recognizable.

For this reason, spirituality was closely bound to form. The icon was not meant to move or provoke; it was meant to guide the gaze in a specific direction. The fresco did not narrate for the pleasure of storytelling, but situated the narrative within a larger whole. The silence of the church, the dimness of the interior, the repetition of gestures—all of this composed an experience that required no explanation.

From a contemporary perspective, it is easy to confuse spirituality with emotionality or a metaphysical mood. In the world under discussion, however, spirituality was practical. It helped people endure uncertainty, violence, and a lack of control over their own fate. Under centuries of foreign domination, it did not offer escape, but a way of persistence.

This is why the images and places we view today are not neutral. They were created as elements of this order of meaning. Severed from it, they lose their function and become mere traces of the past. To attempt to understand them does not require the adoption of faith, but the acknowledgment that, for those who created them, spirituality was a real and effective means of organizing the world.

In this project, spirituality is neither the goal nor a subject in itself. It is the background that allows us to see why the image was more than representation, and the church more than a building. It is an effort to grasp the logic of a world in which meaning did not end with matter—even if we do not need to share that logic today.

Spirituality, understood in this way, demands neither assent nor identification. It requires only attentiveness and a willingness to recognize that, for centuries, there existed an order in which images, texts, and space spoke of more than what can be measured and described. Without this perspective, the story of Crete remains incomplete.