Epano Episkopi: the former bishop’s seat of Sitia

Epano Episkopi – the village of the “Upper Bishopric”

Epano Episkopi (Επάνω Επισκοπή), literally the “Upper Bishopric”, lies about twelve kilometres south of Sitia on the road that crosses the peninsula to Ierapetra, a short way beyond Maronia. The small village clings to a green hillside at about 270 metres above the valley of the Pantelis stream; it formerly belonged to the rural commune of Tourtouli, the present-day Agios Georgios, and is now a thinly populated district of the municipality of Sitia. Its very name preserves the memory of a time when ecclesiastical power was closely bound up with the settlements of the interior: after the raids on the coasts, bishops’ seats were often moved from the harbour towns to more sheltered places inland. Epano Episkopi is therefore more than a village with a handsome church – it is one of the places where the history of Sitia can be read from its ecclesiastical geography.

The most important monument of the place is the former bishop’s house, the Episkopio. In the Venetian period the Latin bishop of Sitia had his seat here; the property is linked by name with Gaspare Viviani, who led the diocese in the 16th century and is recorded in 1566 as living at the bishopric with four priests. The courtyard, the carefully laid masonry and the surviving remnants of wall decoration are a reminder that Orthodox and Latin church structures existed side by side on Crete – at times in one and the same settlement.

The church of the Nativity of the Virgin, St George and St John

On the village square, in the shade of old plane trees, stands its large three-aisled church. Each of its barrel-vaulted aisles has its own patron: the central one is dedicated to the Nativity of the Virgin, the right to John the Baptist, the left to St George. According to the Orthodox Church of Crete the building probably rises over the remains of an Early Christian basilica – an indication that the spot was a spiritual centre long before the Venetians. The church collapsed at some point and was rebuilt, so that what stands today incorporates parts of the original fabric; a funerary niche, an arcosolium, is let into the north wall, and traces of fresco survive here and there. Façade and masonry form a coherent architectural whole, and the coat of arms set into the wall by the entrance, with Viviani’s initials, connects the building with the Latin bishop.

Local tradition relates that during Viviani’s episcopate the interior was shared between Catholics and Orthodox: under one roof both communities held their services, each in its own aisle. This memory makes the church a sign of the difficult but very real coexistence of two Christian traditions in Venetian Crete. The principal feast of the central aisle falls, by the Orthodox calendar, on 8 September, the day of the Nativity of the Virgin.

From Byzantine bishopric to Venetian Sitia

The history of Epano Episkopi is interwoven with the wider fortunes of the diocese of Sitia. It was founded in the 7th or 8th century; a bishop of Sitia is attested for the year 731. In the Byzantine centuries the ecclesiastical centres of eastern Crete depended on the safety of the roads and coasts: when Arab raids began from 823, the bishops withdrew from the coastal towns to villages in the hinterland, and it is from that time that the two places called Episkopi are recorded in the neighbourhood of Sitia. After the reconquest of the island the diocese was restored; a list dating from about 980 once again names a bishop of Sitia.

The Venetians, who acquired Crete in 1204, later reorganised the government of the Church and put Latin bishops in place of the Orthodox ones. The first known is Antonius of Venice (1317–1323), followed by some twenty further Latin incumbents; the last, Giorgio Minotto, held office from 1634 to 1651. In the 16th century the bishop’s residence was associated with the fortified town, whose citadel, the Kazarma – from the Italian casa di arma – still looks down on the harbour, and in 1571 the diocese was united with that of Ierapetra. Sitia itself went through troubled times: in 1508 a severe earthquake shook the town, in 1538 Hayreddin Barbarossa laid waste the suburb, and in 1651, in the course of the long Cretan War, the Venetians abandoned the place and razed its walls. It then lay deserted for some two centuries, until rebuilding began in 1870 under the Ottoman governor Hüseyin Avni Pasha. Epano Episkopi has kept the memory of these shifts in its name and in the building of the bishop’s house.

The village thus presents history not as one rule neatly succeeding another but as a layering of periods. In one place the Byzantine church tradition, the Latin administration of Venice, the Orthodox memory of the community and the rural everyday life of today all meet.

Archaeological traces around the village

North of Epano Episkopi ancient tombs have come to light; some of the sarcophagi are now kept in the Archaeological Museum of Ierapetra. About a kilometre east of the village, on rising ground in the area called Trypitos near the Pantelis stream, are the remains of a fortified outpost of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. What survives is a wall about two metres high – 2.10 metres at its best – built of large, dressed rectangular blocks in pseudo-isodomic courses, with the joints packed with smaller stones; it is some 17 metres long. Nikolaos Platon examined the site in 1960 on behalf of the Archaeological Society at Athens and found the north-west corner in fairly good condition, though the interior walls had already suffered; on the evidence of the potsherds he dated its construction to the Classical period. Further investigation followed in 1978, and in 1980 it was placed under protection. Scholars interpret it as a frontier fort of Praisos, which watched over the valley and the network of roads on the north-western border of the city’s territory, its careful masonry a statement of the wealth and power of the city behind it. Such monuments show that the routes around Sitia were important long before the Venetians: they were controlled and guarded, and they linked the coast with the settlements of the Cretan interior.

Not far away stands the Byzantine church of St Basil (Agios Vasilios), installed in a building that had originally served as a bathhouse. Such a combination of functions is particularly characteristic of Crete: the buildings of antiquity and late antiquity did not vanish without trace but were given a second life in Christian architecture.

Epano Episkopi today

Today people come here for the church, the bishop’s house and the quiet farming landscape. The village, which is reached by asphalt road, is best explored on foot: from the square with its plane trees across to the former episcopal residence, and from there on to the churches and archaeological sites round about. Those travelling by car can easily combine the visit with nearby Praisos, whose borders the outpost of Trypitos once protected; its ruins spread over three hills, two of them residential and the third, the Altar Hill, the site of the main sanctuary, and were first dug extensively by R. C. Bosanquet in 1901. Epano Episkopi offers no single monumental building, but it does offer the rare opportunity to see how church history, archaeology and everyday life have been preserved in one small landscape.