Maronia: caves, churches and the memory of the olive

Maronia: a village on the River Pantelis

Maronia (Μαρωνιά) lies in the east of Lasithi, on the western bank of the River Pantelis, about twelve kilometres from Sitia on the road to Ierapetra – some four kilometres beyond Piskokefalo – and a good 120 metres above the sea. With its few hundred inhabitants the village seems quiet and easily taken in, yet its history is made up of many layers: Venetian records, Orthodox churches, an Ottoman fountain, an old olive mill and archaeological sites in the surrounding country. In the documents of the Venetian period the place appears as Marunea – Francesco Barozzi mentions it in 1577, and the census of 1583 records 120 inhabitants – and it turns up again in the Ottoman registers of 1671; by the census of 1881 it had 165 inhabitants, all of them Christian. Local tradition traces the name to an incomer from Maroneia in Thrace.

Through the village runs the way to the small caves of Spiliaria and Agionero. In the Agionero cave rises a spring which the villagers call “holy water” – the name means nothing else – and to which they attribute healing power. For Maronia this is more than natural beauty: the water joins Christian piety to the age-old veneration of springs that is so characteristic of Crete.

The churches of the Holy Trinity and of the Dormition of the Virgin

In the middle of Maronia stand the two principal churches: Agia Triada, the church of the Holy Trinity, and the church of the Kimisis tis Theotokou, the Dormition of the Virgin. The parish of the Trinity keeps its patronal feast at Pentecost – by the Orthodox calendar, that is, fifty days after Greek Easter – and the church of the Virgin on 15 August, the greatest Marian feast of the summer. Their standing side by side shows how, in a Cretan village, several churches and festivals belong to a single shared memory.

In the church of the Dormition prayers are said especially before the icon of the Hodegetria; this image of the Mother of God who shows the way holds an important place in the spiritual life of the community.

The Ottoman fountain and the old “Fabrika”

In the lanes of Maronia a stone fountain of the Ottoman period has survived. Such watering places were part of the everyday infrastructure: here people drew water, here the villagers met, here travellers rested. Its decorated masonry is a reminder that the Ottoman legacy of the village is not only one of war but also of useful buildings that served generations. The other side of that age is represented by Kapetan Sifis Dermitzakis, a freedom fighter born in Maronia in 1821 who fought in the Peloponnese as well as in the Cretan risings, was decorated for his service and died in 1866, the year of the great revolt.

On the south-eastern edge of the village, beside the church of the Virgin and the bed of the Pantelis, stands the old olive mill. The locals call it the “Fabrika”. It was built in 1870 by the Protopapas, an archpriest who came from Lastros and died in 1924 at the age of ninety; from 1873 to 1955 it worked without interruption and produced, so it is said, an average of some 300 oka of oil a day – about 380 kilograms. The building is modest, seven and a half metres by six and four metres high, with an entrance arch of dressed blocks and a stone transverse arch dividing the anteroom from the working space. Inside, the equipment of traditional oil-making has remained in place: three great round millstones, the press with its pulley, the winch, scales, baskets and trough – the gear that turned the olive harvest into oil. After the builder the mill passed to his son, himself a priest, and then to his granddaughter, Anna Kouri, who gave the building to the community; it is a listed monument, was restored with money from the European Leader programme and has been entrusted to the village’s cultural association, which bears the name of the river. It is intended to serve as a museum of olive culture – a place where peasant technology is seen not in photographs but in its actual setting.

Kefala and the Minoan past

Not far from the village is Kefala, a rise in whose rock ancient tombs have been cut. Nearby, archaeologists have identified a Minoan settlement. Taken together, these finds show that the country around Maronia was no chance halting place but an area in which people lived, buried their dead and worked the land across different ages. The valley of the Pantelis, which reaches the sea at Sitia, has always been a natural route from the coast into the hills.

Kefala does not make Maronia into an ancient city, nor does it replace archaeological investigation with a pretty legend. It is a small but eloquent piece of the cultural landscape of Sitia, in which the village’s connection with old routes, with water and with the fertile valley can still be read today.

Maronia today

Today Maronia keeps the quiet rhythm of a village community that lives chiefly from olive oil – the district of Sitia is known for the quality of its oil, which is sold under its own protected designation of origin. The village is reached by asphalt road and can be seen on foot in an hour or two. It is worth walking from the churches to the fountain, then going down to the old olive mill and continuing along the way to Kefala and the caves; for the caves it is best to ask for the path at the kafenio. In this way the village reveals itself little by little: first as a living settlement, then as a place that remembers the Venetian and Ottoman periods, and finally as part of the very ancient archaeological landscape of eastern Crete.