Arkadi Monastery stands on a plateau on the western slopes of Psiloritis, about 23 kilometres southeast of Rethymno in Crete. It is one of the most visited places on the island, and for Cretans it is not really a monastery at all. It is a national memorial.

Nobody knows exactly when it was founded. Tradition gives the credit to Byzantine emperors, but there is no evidence for that. It was more probably founded by a monk called Arkadios, some time around the eleventh or twelfth century.

The building that visitors come to see is later. The church was completed in 1587, under an abbot called Klimis Chortatzis, and its front is one of the finest pieces of Renaissance architecture in Crete — columns, pediments and carved detail, influenced by the Italian architects Serlio and Palladio, on an Orthodox church with two naves.

November 1866

Crete rose against Ottoman rule in 1866, and Arkadi became the headquarters of the revolt in the Rethymno district.

On 8 November an Ottoman army of around fifteen thousand men, with thirty cannons, surrounded the monastery. Inside were roughly two hundred and fifty armed men, including monks, and some nine hundred other people — mostly women and children from the villages nearby.

The fighting lasted two days. When the gate finally fell and the soldiers came into the courtyard, the survivors gathered in the powder magazine, an old wine cellar, and blew it up.

The news travelled. Victor Hugo wrote letters about Arkadi that were published across Europe, Garibaldi wrote in support, and volunteers came to Crete from Italy, France, Poland, Hungary and the United States. The revolt itself failed, but the pressure it created did not go away. Crete became autonomous in 1898 and joined Greece in 1913.

8 November is still a day of commemoration, and it is held here.

What you see today

The powder magazine was never rebuilt. It is roofless, the walls are still marked, and there is nothing in it. This is the point of the visit.

In the courtyard, the church front survived the fire that destroyed the interior. The carved wooden screen inside dates from 1902. A cypress tree in the yard still carries a shell fragment in its trunk.

Outside the walls, the old windmill is now the ossuary, and it holds the skulls and bones of those who died.

The museum contains icons, manuscripts, weapons and documents from 1866, and a collection of gold-embroidered vestments — the monastery ran an embroidery workshop for around two hundred years, from the middle of the seventeenth century, and it was one of the most important of its kind.