The next day we headed straight to Heraklion right in the morning to see the Palace of Knossos, but along the way we decided to drop by a monastery mentioned in the guidebook. It's called Arkadi, and is extremely famous for being the focal point of the 1866 rebellion against the Turks (these nasty restless guys again). As we already know, by that year the Turks had possessed Crete for two centuries already, despite constant bloody uprisings. In 1866, a downright revolution began, and they chose the monastery, located 23 km from Rethymno, the then center of power, as their headquarters.
At first we were even somewhat disappointed: just a wall like any other wall
Why the monastery was chosen for this purpose, we realized right on the approach – there was only one road leading to it, and even that one had a terrible incline and was squeezed between the rocks. With some difficulty, I managed to pick the right direction, because we didn't have GPS, and besides, it lies often in Crete.
When the Turkish pasha, ruling at the time from Rethymno, found out that the rebels were sitting in the monastery, he demanded that the abbot Gabriel Marinakis hand over the scoundrels under the threat of destroying the building. The pasha screwed up: the abbot himself was the boss of the rebel committee, and right upon receiving the ultimatum he began to fortify the defenses. All just to wake up one day and discover that 15 thousand Turkish soldiers and 30 cannons had gathered around. They did get there, the bastards, despite the inaccessibility. In the monastery itself, there were only 259 highlanders with little knives, including 45 monks and 12 committee members. Plus 700 women and children who had flocked under the monastery walls at the sight of the Turkish grunts.
The Turks' demand to surrender was met with hurricane fire: apparently, the defenders had more than just little knives. Cretan snipers took up positions in a nearby mill: they were of course gradually wiped out, but far from immediately. The first day the monastery held out: at night two special agents climbed out of a window, walked past mountains of Turkish corpses, and went to look for help. When they found out there was nowhere to get it from, one returned back to certain death.
On the second day of the battle, the Turks brought in some serious caliber from Rethymno, and started putting holes in the outer gates and walls that we saw in the photo above. The abbot told everyone to go inside, while he himself started playing Terminator and shooting back, knowing that he was ordered to be taken alive. Understandably, they shot him, but supposedly he crossed everyone before that. A true Terminator he was!
By lunchtime there was nothing left of the outer walls: the Turks were flattening them properly, not wanting to risk it anymore. The defenders' ammo was running low, the outcome of the matter was clear. The dude in the photo on the right, named Constantine, decided that since the fighting spirit was high, he should take advantage of it.
So, the Turks burst inside, where they were met by the remaining fighters with bare little knives. Where did Constantine disappear to with the women and children? He was in the powder cellar, together with 400 noncombatants. When the Turks were right up close, Constantine dashingly tossed a lit cigarette into a barrel of gunpowder. A savage explosion shook the monastery, killing all the crazy brave souls in the cellar and a couple of hundred Turkish soldiers. When the smoke cleared, it turned out that 864 Cretans had fallen, but took almost twice as many enemies with them to the grave. The 114 defenders left alive were immediately executed by the Turks, three managed to escape and make up this story. I'd just be curious to know what the participants from the other side say about it?
Be that as it may, competent PR did its job: Europe found out about the Turkish atrocities, and the great powers comprising England, France, Italy, and Russia brought peacekeeping troops onto the island, which subsequently led to the independence of Crete. So if you think that things used to be different back in the day, think again. Propaganda and geopolitics have always been the same: only the roster of participants changes.
Interestingly, all the cats I met in Crete were much smaller than ours. I think it would be quite logical to speculate that the heat somehow affects the organs secreting growth hormones, well, or something like that.
By the way, they rebuilt the monastery back up just 4 years after the rebellion. Now it's being properly restored: the household and garden are looked after by two monks, but there are crowds of builders around renovating the walls.
After our visit to Arkadi, we continued our way to Heraklion to see what no tourist in Crete misses out on. Namely, the Palace of Knossos, the very one where they kept the Minotaur. But more on that – in the next episode.