Pachia Ammos and the Church of St Photini

Where Crete is at its narrowest and barely twelve kilometres separate the Sea of Crete from the Libyan Sea, the coastal village of Pachia Ammos lies in the innermost corner of Mirabello Bay, at the fork where the road from Heraklion and Agios Nikolaos divides for Sitia and for Ierapetra. Its beach is the longest on the whole north coast of the province of Ierapetra, and immediately above the village rises the church of St Photini – a name familiar in the Slavic world as Svetlana.

The village is young. The place name is recorded as early as 1630, but there was no settlement then; one grew up only at the beginning of the 20th century, and quickly. The census of 1928 lists Pachia Ammos for the first time – with 162 inhabitants – and by 2011 there were 574; the community as a whole counted 827 in 2021. The village owes its rise to its position at a crossroads: here the roads from Agios Nikolaos, Sitia and Ierapetra meet. Along the seafront road stands a row of fish tavernas for which the place is known far beyond the district. Two kilometres to the west, on a hill, lies the Minoan town of Gournia, which flourished around 1600 BC; in the village itself the Institute for Aegean Prehistory has set up its study centre for East Crete, where the finds from the excavations around the bay are worked on, with a library, archives and laboratories for conservation, ceramic petrography and the study of animal bones.

The beach at the head of the bay

In the west the shore is sand; towards the east it turns to shingle, with tamarisks here and there, and the bed of the stream that issues from the Ha Gorge reaches the sea there after winter rain. The position has its price, however: Pachia Ammos is the southernmost point of Mirabello Bay, and in a north wind the waves carry here whatever has found its way into the water anywhere in the Aegean. The flotsam has long been a standing nuisance to the local authorities, who have to have the beach cleaned again and again. Bathing is good all the same, in the western section below the parish church of St Nicholas. There the mole of the little fishing harbour keeps off the swell; the beach has sunshades and loungers, and the water is very clean. On windy days, when surf is running in the open part of the bay, this is the only really calm spot. Offshore, opposite the beach, lies the islet of Konida, which can be reached by boat.

The church of the Great Martyr St Photini

The church of the holy Great Martyr Photini the Samaritan, Equal to the Apostles (Agía Fotiní i Samarítis), is a building of our own time. It stands beside the hill of Chalepa, on which a few remains of an old tower and a gun emplacement survive: the fort of Pachia Ammos, which the Ottoman commander Hüseyin Avni Pasha had built in 1868 in order to cut communication between the Cretan insurgents and to keep watch on the coast.

Work on the cross-in-square church was begun in 1965 by Emmanouil Tsikalakis, a survivor of the Greek campaign in Asia Minor. It was carried on by his heirs, Georgios Peronikolis and a younger Emmanouil Tsikalakis. For the founder the church was the fulfilment of a vow. When Smyrna fell in 1922 he had taken refuge from the Turkish troops in the celebrated church of St Photini, renowned for its beauty, the cathedral of the city’s Greek community – and he ascribed his deliverance to the saint. In gratitude to her a house of God bearing the same name was to rise in his Cretan homeland.

Almost half a century passed before it was finished. According to the Metropolis of Ierapytna and Sitia, the heirs made the plot over to the parish in 2004; by 2008 the church was complete, and on 27 September of that year Metropolitan Evgenios performed the solemn opening of the doors. The icons were painted by Nikolaos Kritikos; the carved icon screen is the work of the local joiner Markos Kounelakis and the gift of Emmanouil Lambrakis. The feast is kept on 26 February, the saint’s day in the Greek calendar, and on the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, the fifth Sunday of the Easter season – the fourth after Easter Day itself; to these the parish adds a festival of the fishermen of Pachia Ammos on 20 August.