Chamezi – folk museum, Minoan oval house and Liopetro fortress

Chamezi: museum, Minoan house and Venetian fortress

Chamezi lies about ten kilometres short of Sitia on the road that leads from Agios Nikolaos into the east of the island, some 430 metres above the sea. The village is small – the census of 2021 gave it 234 inhabitants, where in 1940 there had been 576 – but its history can be traced a long way back: in the Venetian register of 1583 it appears as Camesi with 371 residents, in 1630 as Glamesi, in the Ottoman census of 1671 as Hamizi and in the Egyptian one of 1834 as Kamesi. In 1881, when 313 Christians and 6 Muslims lived here, and until 1940, the official spelling was Chamaizi – the form still used by archaeologists for the Minoan site. In its lanes objects of traditional Cretan life and monuments of several periods have survived.

The folk museum

The local museum of folk life and crafts (Laografiko Mousio) is housed in an old Cretan dwelling of the 19th century. It was set up in 1978 on the initiative of the cultural association of Chamezi; the villagers themselves gave the exhibits, many of which carry family memories. The main wing shows the interior of a farmhouse, with loom and hand-woven textiles, lamps, household goods, storage jars, millstones and the stone-built bread oven. In 1993 a second wing was added: an oil mill for pressing olives, a fully equipped smithy and a yard with the press in which the grapes were trodden. The still in which raki was distilled can be seen too. The museum is open on only a few mornings a week, latterly on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 10 to 1; it is advisable to ask in the village beforehand.

The oval house on Souvloto Mouri

Not far from the village, on the conical hill of Souvloto Mouri – the name means “pointed hill” – lies the Minoan “egg-shaped house”, an oval building uncovered in 1903 by the Cretan archaeologist Stefanos Xanthoudidis and re-examined in 1971 by Kostis Davaras. It dates from the Middle Minoan IA phase, that is from about the 20th century BC, the time immediately before the first palaces, and it stands on the foundations of older houses of the Early Minoan period, whose curving lines it may have inherited. The rooms are arranged around a small court with a cistern and follow the sweep of the enclosing wall with their outer sides; there was an entrance on the east and another on the west. What was long taken for a well is a tank cut into the rock to hold rainwater from the roofs, for the hilltop has neither spring nor well. Because Xanthoudidis found clay figurines, the complex was at first thought to be a peak sanctuary; today it is regarded as a dwelling that incorporated a small cult room – the household pottery, fragments of storage jars, loomweights and hearth ash point the same way – and one that served equally well as a look-out. From the hill the view extends across the bay of Sitia. The site is signposted from the main road; the finds are in the museums of Heraklion and Agios Nikolaos.

The fortress of Liopetro

North of the village, high above the coast, on the site of an ancient acropolis, rises the Venetian fortress of Liopetro (Frourio Liopetro). Stretches of the walls and towers survive, together with vaulted cisterns, a round water tank and the remains of other buildings, and the chapel of the Prophet Elijah still stands on the summit; from there a wide view opens over the surrounding country and the sea. The stronghold was a late Venetian project: proposed in 1579 by the provveditore Giacomo Foscarini and urged again in the 1590s, it was built after 1595 as a refuge meant to shelter some 6,000 country people in the event of a Turkish attack – a role it never played, for when the Ottomans came the inhabitants were taken to Candia instead. The name is said to be a shortening of leon di petra, “lion of stone”. The French scholar Paul Faure suggested that the ancient city of Petra stood here. The ascent, at first by a dirt track, ends on a path without shade.