Kavousi – painted churches, the ancient olive tree and Azoria

Kavousi (Καβούσι) lies 26 kilometres east of Agios Nikolaos and 19 kilometres north-east of Ierapetra, at about 140 metres above sea level, at the foot of two formidable mountains and looking out over the Sea of Crete and a plain covered in olive trees. Plane trees, olives and springs feeding small watercourses give the village a greenness that is unusual in the dry east of the island; the stream that runs through the valley gathers the water of the Thrypti and Kliros mountains. From here the paths set out for the old settlements on the heights, for the olive grove and for the gorges of eastern Lasithi. The village first appears in the records in 1577; in 1881 it had 955 inhabitants, in 2011 only 559, and the census of 2021 counted 539. The name is explained in the Cretan dialect by a word for a small hollow in which water collects, or simply for a spring – the derivation is not certain, though one quarter of the village, Ligaras, is itself named after the chaste trees that grew around such a spring.

The Byzantine churches

In the middle of the village, just off the main square, stands the church of St George, a single-aisled building with several layers of wall painting from the 14th and 15th centuries. Among the surviving subjects are St George on horseback, the Last Judgement, St Mary of Egypt and the Virgin suckling the Child (Galaktotrophousa). The walls also carry a great many inscriptions scratched by visitors and donors, the earliest known of them dated 1443. Until 1935 the churchyard served as the village cemetery. The feast of St George is kept on 23 April and again on 3 November, the day that commemorates the translation of his relics.

About a hundred metres to the south, in the Ligaras quarter and reached only on foot through the narrow lanes, is the church of the Twelve Apostles, another single-aisled, barrel-vaulted building, with a broad courtyard that looks down the valley to the sea; close by are the remains of a Byzantine wall that once defended the settlement. It too preserves two layers of painting, of the 14th and 15th centuries, including scenes from the Gospel cycle – thirteen episodes from the life of Christ – with the Nativity and the Three Holy Children in the Fiery Furnace on the south wall of the sanctuary, and a large Last Judgement in which the sinners are shown in hell. Cleaning by conservators has left the paintings in notably good condition. The carved wooden iconostasis is later, and shows how the church went on being used and refurbished long after the medieval decoration was finished. Further afield there are the painted chapel of St Anthony by Tholos beach and the ruin of an Early Byzantine church of St John in a cave to the west of the village.

Kavousi and the ancient olive tree

Close to Kavousi lie the excavated site of Azoria and the famous “Minoan” olive tree. The tree stands about a kilometre south of the village, beside the road to the hamlet of Avgo at roughly 250 metres above sea level, next to the remains of the ancient settlement and in the middle of what is called the “Minoan Grove of Peace”, among other venerable trees. It has been declared a natural monument by the Association of Cretan Olive Municipalities, both for the size of its trunk and because it grows within sight of three ancient settlements; the trunk has grown out of an immensely old stock, and its age is estimated from archaeological and botanical evidence. Analysis of the annual rings pointed to a planting between 1350 and 1100 BC. At a height of 80 centimetres the trunk measures 4.90 metres across and 14.20 metres round, and at ground level more than 22 metres. Botanically it is a cultivated variety – Olea europaea var. mastoeidis, known locally as mouratoelia – grafted on to a wild olive, which in the view of the Cretan olive growers makes it the oldest known example of grafting anywhere. At the Athens Olympics of 2004 the winner of the women’s marathon was crowned with a wreath of branches from this tree; they had been ceremonially cut at the suggestion of the villagers and the municipality of Ierapetra, to which the tree belongs.

The archaeological landscape

Azoria, Kastro and Vrontas form a single historical landscape in which the traces of Minoan and later settlements can still be read on the ground. All three were first explored as early as 1900 by Harriet Boyd, working for the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Vrontas, on a spur south of the village at 427 metres, was inhabited chiefly between 1200 and 1025 BC: after a survey in 1974 and the founding of the Kavousi Project in 1978 by Geraldine Gesell, Leslie Day and William Coulson, the American School uncovered there between 1987 and 1992 a large house on the summit that seems to have been the seat of the community’s leader, a free-standing shrine with clay figures of the goddess with upraised arms, at least five house complexes – some twenty houses in all – a potter’s kiln and dozens of tombs, among them eleven small corbelled tholoi and some thirty stone-lined enclosures holding the cremations of the 8th and 7th centuries BC. Kastro stands higher still, on a rocky peak at 713 metres – a place of refuge in the unsettled centuries after the end of the palaces, occupied from the early 12th to the middle of the 7th century BC. Azoria, finally, on a double-topped hill some 365 metres high directly above the olive tree and three kilometres from the sea, grew in the 7th and 6th centuries BC into a small town of perhaps fifteen hectares, with public buildings, dining rooms, storerooms and a shrine: a communal dining building with its own kitchens and stores, and a monumental civic hall of about 200 square metres with stepped benches along its walls. Since 2002 it has been investigated afresh by a team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the early 5th century BC it burnt down completely; around 200 BC a single watchtower was built on the height. The finds from all three sites are divided between the museums of Agios Nikolaos and Ierapetra and the American study centre at Pachia Ammos.

Everywhere you come across old paths, terraces and stone buildings – on Vrontas even a Venetian farmstead with its threshing floors – and nearby run the routes to Mochlos, to the Richtis Gorge and down to the coast. The district also includes the early copper-smelting site of Chrysokamino and the stalactite cave of Theriospilio. Kavousi is therefore more than a green village: it is a base from which to get to know both the archaeology and the natural world of eastern Crete.

The monuments of Kavousi ask for consideration: the frescoes must not be touched, and the old olive tree and the archaeological remains should be visited only by the marked paths. In that way the churches, where services are still held, are preserved along with the fragile evidence of Minoan history.