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Sights - Chania County |
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Chrysoskalitissa |
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When
you have passed the fertile valley in the county of Inachorio, well-known
for its numerous chestnut trees, you are approaching the coast, where the
vegetation is thinning, and the chalky mountains are shining, making the
light almost harsh. You have hardly left the valley, before you catch
sight of the chalk-white Chrysoskalitissa Monastery situated on a rock in
the distance.
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It
is not known with certainty when the monastery was founded, but when
Hieronymo Semitecolo in 1639 sailed around the coasts of West Crete to map
the coast line for the Venetian regime that feared an approaching Turkish
invasion, he mentions the monastery by name:
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A
mile from this landing stage stands Panagia Chrysoskalitissa surrounded by a
few houses.
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There
is a good deal of uncertainty about the history of the monastery. Nikos
Psilakis writes in his book about Byzantine churches and monasteries in
Crete that there at the beginning was a monastery to Agios Nikolaos, who is
the saint of the sailors. It was later abandoned, but the buildings still
existed, when the English commander Spratt visited the place in 1865.
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The monastery experienced a new era, when the monk Manasssis Glynias - with the byname Koutsomytis - in 1881 started to add new buildings to the existing monastery, which then had six monks. As early as 20 years later it was mentioned in the official registration as being a convent with 15 nuns.
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church - built in 1894 - is dedicated to The Passing Away of Virgin Mary
and to the Trinity. The icons are done by the painters Vlachakis and
Polakis, while the old icon of The Passing Away of Virgin Mary is said to
be several hundreds of years old.
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The
name of the monastery which means Panagia with the Gold Step, refers to
the legend telling us that the monks made the last of the steps up to the
monastery of the purest gold, while it was still rich and had landed
property from Sfinari in the north to Elafonisi in the south. During the
Turkish period the monastery had to hand over the gold step to the sultan
in order to prevent him from stripping the Patriarchate in Constantinople
of its privileges. Another legend says that the gold step is certainly
still existing, but you are able to see it, only if you have a pure and
innocent heart. A third legend claims that the gold step never existed,
and the rumour of it is the result of the monks having made a hollow step
in order to hide their treasures in it, when and if the monastery was
attacked. And attacked it was, for who did not want to get hold of a step
made of pure gold?
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of the attacks, from which the monastery escaped undamaged, was in 1824,
when the Turks under the leadership of Ibrahim Pasha Messez in connection
with the massacre on women and children on Elafonisi, intended to plunder
the monastery too. But the soldiers were forced to flee, when they were
attacked by bad-tempered swarms of bees, living in the rock.
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