Piskokefalo: the village of the Kornaros family

Piskokefalo and the house of Kornaros

Piskokefalo lies some three kilometres south of Sitia, on the road that runs up the valley of the Pantelis river towards Lithines, Ierapetra and the south coast. This large and prosperous village of about seven hundred people is among the most important settlements in the hinterland of the town; olive groves and gardens stretch along the valley floor. It was already a substantial place under Venice – a census of 1583 counted 442 inhabitants – and belonged to the estates of the Kornaros (Cornaro) family, a Venetian noble house that had put down roots in Crete and made the language and culture of the island its own. Later, until 1871, it was the seat of the Ottoman administration of the province of Sitia. Two brothers of the Kornaros family are associated with Piskokefalo: the poet Vitsentzos Kornaros, author of the “Erotokritos”, and the historian Andreas Kornaros.

In the village the Kornaros manor and the watermill that went with it have survived. The house, a stone building of about 1550 with a ground floor and an upper storey, and the mill, which stands east of the main square, have both been restored and are intended as a memorial to the poet, with a museum devoted to him. Above the entrance to the church of St George (Agios Georgios) the family’s coat of arms is displayed. The present building dates from the 19th century – it was completed in 1862, the belfry being added later – and keeps the features of the rural church architecture of eastern Crete: a single barrel-vaulted nave, plain stone walls, a framed doorway and a small bell-cote. Unusually for the district, it has a wooden gallery running round three sides, reached by a staircase on the outside.

Archaeology and Byzantine monuments

In the country around Piskokefalo archaeologists have investigated a Minoan country house and a settlement and sanctuary on the hill of Katrinia. The country house lies right beside the road to Sitia: a two-storey building on the slope above the river bed, of which the foundations, the sequence of rooms and flights of stairs survive, together with the massive boulders that protected it on the side of the stream. On Katrinia, west of the village, Nikolaos Platon excavated a Minoan peak sanctuary in 1952 for the Archaeological Society, after illicit diggers had already put statuettes on the market; some of these were later confiscated. The deposit belongs to the age of the first palaces, the Middle Minoan II–III period, and its terracottas are among the finest of that time. The finds include clay figures of men and women with elaborately dressed hair – the women in decorated, pleated dresses, some of them shown pregnant, the men with long locks – painted pottery, beads and jewellery, models of small shrines with horns of consecration, and a striking number of clay beetles, votive offerings representing the rhinoceros beetle. Part of the material is kept in the Archaeological Museum of Sitia. Little is to be seen on the hill itself today.

Also in the neighbourhood are the church of St Anne (Agia Anna) and the chapels of the Panagia of Trapezounta, whose name recalls the deserted settlement of Trapezonda, held to be the poet’s birthplace. In neighbouring Kato Episkopi, barely a kilometre away, stands the Byzantine church of the Holy Apostles (Agii Apostoli), dedicated to Peter and Paul; the name of the village points to a former bishop’s seat, and it was probably here that the bishops of Sitia resided in the second Byzantine period. The building is a curiosity – a bathhouse of the 11th century turned into a church in about the 15th, its central space covered by an octagonal dome and its brickwork set with ceramic patterns. Further up the valley, in well-watered Zou, rises the spring that has long supplied Sitia with drinking water, and beside it stands an old mill. These monuments link the farming landscape of today with the history of Byzantine and Venetian Crete. Half a day is enough for the visit: begin at the manor and the church of St George, drive to the Minoan country house and finish at Kato Episkopi and Zou – preferably in the morning, before the heat settles in the valley.