About the route
Sitia is a most attractive resort town, its houses stepped like the tiers of an amphitheatre round the deep bay of Didymos. The seafront promenade, the long sandy beach east of the centre, cafés, tavernas, restaurants, bars and accommodation of every category make it a convenient base for excursions to Vai, Toplou, Zakros and the hill villages round about. Yet Sitia, a town of some 11,000 people, has kept the leisurely pace of a harbour town, and the hospitality of its inhabitants is still very much a part of everyday life. The surrounding country is famous for its olive oil and its sultanas; a small airport, opened in June 1984 and named after the poet Vitsentzos Kornaros, links the town with Athens.
The buildings one sees today date mostly from the 19th to the 21st century, but the town stands on the site of the ancient harbour centre of Itia (Eteia), and the district is far older still: Neolithic remains go back to about 3000 BC, and on the hill of Petras, at the eastern edge of the modern town, a Minoan palace has been excavated. Archaeological finds and written records show that life continued here in Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman times as well.
Itia and ancient Sitia
Ancient Itia struck its own coins and controlled part of the sea routes of eastern Crete. The Hellenistic town lay on Cape Tripitos, about three kilometres from the present one. Excavation has brought to light stretches of the town wall, residential quarters, painted pottery, coins and jewellery. These finds are displayed, together with material from Mochlos, Psira, Petras, Palekastro and Zakros, in the Archaeological Museum of Sitia.
Myson and Vitsentzos Kornaros
Two outstanding figures, separated by many centuries, are associated with Sitia. Myson, according to one ancient tradition a son of old Itia, was counted among the Seven Sages of Greece – Plato, in the “Protagoras”, gives him the place that other lists assign to Periander of Corinth. His name became attached to teachings on self-control, justice and moral responsibility, and to the maxim that arguments should be tested by the facts, not facts by arguments. The oracle at Delphi is said to have declared him the most upright of men: when the Scythian Anacharsis asked who was wiser than himself, the answer was Myson. Diogenes Laertius, the chief source for his life, adds that he lived to the age of 97.
Vitsentzos Kornaros is the great poet of the Cretan Renaissance and the author of the “Erotokritos”. The verse romance, composed between about 1590 and 1610, is written in the Cretan dialect – essentially the speech of the Sitia district – and runs to some ten thousand rhymed fifteen-syllable lines (10,012, to be exact, the last twelve of which speak of the poet himself). Modelled on the French medieval romance “Paris et Vienne” and set in an imagined ancient Athens, it tells of the love between Erotokritos and Aretousa, the king’s daughter, of trials, exile, fidelity and honour. It circulated in manuscript for a century before it was first printed in Venice in 1713. For Cretans it is not only a literary classic but one of the central texts of their cultural identity; whole passages are still sung to the lyra as mantinades. Kornaros came of a Venetian-Cretan noble family, was born in the 16th century – 1553 is the date usually given – in the neighbourhood of Sitia, and later lived in Chandax (Candia, the present Heraklion), where he died in 1613 or 1614. A monument by the harbour commemorates him.
The Venetian fortress of Kazarma
Above the town survives the Kazarma, part of the Venetian fortifications of the 13th century, which were raised on older Byzantine remains; soon after 1204 the Genoese freebooter Enrico Pescatore, who then held parts of Crete, is said to have put the works in order. The name comes from the Italian casa di arma, “house of arms”, for this was where the garrison was quartered. Earthquakes in 1303 and 1508 did the fortress grave damage; in 1538 the corsair fleet of Hayreddin Barbarossa laid waste the lower town but was unable to take the fortified citadel. In 1555 Venice granted funds for repairs, though they could not restore its former strength.
When the Ottomans landed on Crete in 1645, the Venetian commander Mocenigo judged the fortress indefensible and eventually had arms and equipment removed to Heraklion; after a long siege Ottoman troops took Sitia in 1651. The inhabitants abandoned the ruined town and moved to Liopetro; parts of the fortifications were blown up so that they should not be left to the enemy. Thus Sitia was destroyed three times over – by earthquake, by pirates and at last by its own masters – and the site lay all but deserted for some two hundred years, until the town was laid out afresh around 1870 under the Ottoman governor Hüseyin Avni Pasha; as late as 1881 it had only 570 inhabitants. The Ottomans rebuilt the Kazarma and added towers with loopholes. The Greek air force used the site until 1966, after which the fortress was protected as a historic monument and partly restored. Today, in summer, it is the setting for the plays, concerts and exhibitions of the “Kornaria” cultural festival, and from the platform there is a wide view over town and bay.
Catholic and Orthodox churches
Venetian Sitia had the Catholic churches of Santa Lucia and Santa Maria. After the destruction of Santa Maria the Orthodox church of the Ascension of Christ was built in its place, and it is still in use as the cemetery church. In this way the fabric of the town preserves the memory of the passage from the Venetian to the Ottoman and the Greek periods.
The Archaeological Museum
The Archaeological Museum of Sitia opened in 1984; its founder was the Cretan archaeologist Nikos Papadakis. In 30 cases it shows finds from about 3500 BC to AD 500, arranged in four sections: the Minoan period, the finds from the palace of Zakros, the Geometric and Archaic periods, and the Graeco-Roman age. Its most precious piece is the Palekastro Kouros, a Minoan statuette of ivory and gold. About 50 centimetres tall and made c. 1450 BC, it is carved from hippopotamus ivory overlaid with gold foil, with hair of grey-green serpentine and eyes of rock crystal; it was recovered in fragments at Palekastro between 1987 and 1990 – the torso first, the head a year later, the legs some ten metres away – scorched and deliberately smashed. The face is lost. It is thought to represent the youthful god of Minoan religion and to have been a cult image, the only one of its kind known. From Zakros come bronze saws, large storage jars marked by the fire that destroyed the palace, and clay tablets in Linear A, among other things; amphorae from a Graeco-Roman shipwreck are conserved in tanks of salt water. The museum also has workshops, storerooms and a specialist archaeological library; the labels are bilingual, in Greek and English. It stands near the bus station and is as a rule open from 8.30 a.m. to 3 p.m., closed on Mondays.
A walk through the town
Sitia is best enjoyed on a leisurely stroll: from the harbour, with its fishing boats and the Kornaros monument, up the stepped lanes to the Kazarma, through the quarters of whitewashed houses and flowering courtyards, and back to the promenade, where in the evening the taverna tables reach right down to the water. Those with an interest in the older ways of the district may add the town’s small Folklore Museum. Anyone who comes in summer should glance at the programme of the Kornaria – an open-air performance within the old fortress walls, with the bay of Didymos as a backdrop, is among the most atmospheric evenings that eastern Crete has to offer.