Agia Fotia – the bay of the “holy fire”

Agia Fotia: a church, two coves and an Early Minoan cemetery

Driving east from Ierapetra along the coast road, a couple of kilometres beyond Ferma, one sees the bay of Agia Fotia only at the last moment: it lies far below the road, enclosed by tall cliffs of conglomerate and a little pine wood that comes right down to the beach. The bay opens at the mouth of a winter stream that gathers the water from the slopes of Thrypti, its bed half hidden among huge plane trees. Fine shingle alternates with patches of coarse grey sand; the water is clear and becomes deep only a few steps from the shore. At the eastern end of the beach a freshwater spring issues from the rock, and less than a kilometre away lies the quieter neighbouring cove of Galini. The Venetian engineer Francesco Basilicata marked the place on his map of 1618 as “Spiaggia di Santa Lucia”.

In former days campers pitched their tents under the pines here summer after summer. Today free camping on the beaches is restricted by conservation rules, but Agia Fotia has remained popular for bathing and walking, with the people of Ierapetra as much as with visitors. In season there are sunbeds, umbrellas, showers, a few tavernas and rooms to let, and tamarisks give natural shade; the rocks at the edges of the bay repay snorkelling, and since the year 2000 a beach volleyball tournament has been held in July. The beach has been awarded the Blue Flag. Thanks to the cliffs the bay is sheltered from most winds. A paved road leads down from the main road, and the buses along the coast stop above.

The other Agia Fotia: a cemetery of the 3rd millennium BC

Lasithi has the place-name twice over, and the archaeological discoveries that have made it known among specialists belong to the northern Agia Fotia, a coastal village a few kilometres east of Sitia on the road to Vai. There the cave of Koufoto lies on the beach, with traces of early human presence going back to the Neolithic, and not far off – about 150 metres from the hill of Koufota – extends one of the largest Early Minoan cemeteries in Crete. The site had been known since 1959, when Nikolaos Platon noted it. The archaeologist Costis Davaras examined 252 tombs of the first half of the 3rd millennium BC, begun in Early Minoan I and still in use in Early Minoan II; some fifty more had already been destroyed. In the small chambers hewn from the soft rock, each closed with an upright stone slab, were found around 1,800 vessels of clay and copper, together with obsidian blades, stone axes, hand mills, fish-hooks, daggers and spearheads, and objects connected with the funerary ritual. The finds are displayed today in the Archaeological Museums of Agios Nikolaos and Sitia.

On the hill of Koufota, a rise of some 25 metres between the cemetery and the sea, Metaxia Tsipopoulou uncovered in 1984 and 1985, ahead of a planned hotel development, a rectangular building complex: 37 rooms arranged round an inner court and surrounded by a fortification wall – a rare example of such deliberate planning from the time before the great palaces. The block measures 18 metres by 27.5, about 500 square metres, with a long, narrow court of 3.5 by 21 metres; the enclosing wall is a metre and a half thick and strengthened by four rounded buttresses, three of them on the north side facing the sea. It was built of medium-sized stones set in mud mortar, on a single storey, and its walls now stand only about half a metre high. Built at the opening of the Middle Minoan period, it was abandoned again after a short life, and circular structures, the largest 7.5 metres across inside and understood as tholos tombs, were later raised over its ruins. The building has occasionally been called an early palace; it is more exact to speak of a large settlement or a protopalatial structure, for the real palaces of Crete arose only considerably later. On the edge of the village a Cretan watermill has also survived and is protected as a monument.

A coast that long stayed empty

The shore road east of Ierapetra still runs through thinly peopled country: bare slopes, scattered farmsteads and small coves between them, among them Achlia, a kilometre and a half beyond Agia Fotia, where a gorge of the same name reaches the sea. The stories of pirate lairs in these coves explain why, in the Middle Ages, people preferred to settle further up in the hills – in villages such as Agios Ioannis or Schinokapsala, from which one could watch the sea without being seen. Only when the coast had become safe, in the 19th and 20th centuries, did gardens, greenhouses and finally the small bathing resorts appear down by the water, Agia Fotia among them.