Gorgolaini Monastery of St George, above Kato Asites

The Monastery of St George Gorgolaini near Kato Asites

The Monastery of St George Gorgolaini (Moni Agiou Georgiou Gorgolaini) stands at about 480 metres at the foot of Mount Koudouni, an eastern spur of Psiloritis. It is some 24 kilometres south-west of Heraklion and roughly a kilometre from Kato Asites, a village of about a thousand people at 450 metres; a tarmac road climbs from the village to the locality known as Kastella, where the buildings lie half hidden among holm-oak scrub, planes and cypresses. Because the ground falls away steeply, the monastery is laid out on three terraces, with the old fountain on the middle one. Venerable planes, cypresses and oaks shade the inner courtyard, and two of them – one cypress and one plane – are protected as natural monuments. The quiet of the garden, the sound of the spring and the stone walls make a place in which the landscape and the life of the church are hard to tell apart.

The monastery first appears in writing in a Venetian document of 1319 under the name Agios Giorgis o Gorgos, St George “the swift”. That makes it one of the oldest monasteries for men on Crete. On one reading, the site began as the burial ground of an earlier church, on whose ruins the foundation rose; local tradition holds that a church of St Nicholas stood here first, and links the founding or rebuilding of the monastery to a churchman named Silvestros, who is said to have used the privileges granted by the Venetians to put up the first katholikon in 1319–20. The present katholikon, the main church, grew out of a single-aisled, barrel-vaulted building completed late in the Venetian period, in 1627, some three centuries after that first church. This older part, with its two transverse arches, is now the south aisle of a two-aisled church dedicated to St George and St Nicholas; the aisle of St Nicholas was added in the early 20th century. Inside stands a richly carved wooden iconostasis of the 19th century, a fine piece of ecclesiastical folk woodcarving; the bell tower, too, dates only from the beginning of the 20th century.

In its best days Gorgolaini was the head monastery – the “kephalomonastiri” – of the district of Malevizi, and under Ottoman rule it absorbed smaller houses that could no longer bear the burden of taxation on their own. As late as the early 20th century it still had as dependencies the monastery of Chrysopigi near Pyrgos and the monastery of St Anthony at Petali, near Sarchos, the latter now a ruin. In those same years it kept up close ties with the monastery of Koudouma on the south coast and its two monk-saints, Parthenios and Eumenios.

The monastery in the history of the Cretan uprisings

Its seclusion in the hills made the monastery an ideal meeting place and hideout for insurgents. Under Ottoman rule Gorgolaini was sacked and burnt several times in reprisal – three times, by local reckoning – and each time the Christians rebuilt it. The consequences of the risings of 1821 and 1866 weighed heaviest. In August 1822 an engagement is said to have been fought nearby between 5,000 rebels and 22,000 Ottoman soldiers; in 1830 Abbot Methodios had the buildings restored with the help of the master builder Neophytos. On 19 August 1866 Captain Michail Korakas summoned the insurgents here and made the monastery his headquarters and base of operations; once the fighting that followed had gone against him and he had withdrawn, it was razed to the ground and the neighbouring villages of Ano and Kato Asites went up in flames. In the battle at Asites in 1868 Korakas’s comrade-in-arms, the seventy-five-year-old Frangias (Frangios) Mastrachas, was killed. His grave and his bust are in the monastery courtyard.

After such devastation the monastery recovered only slowly; in the early 20th century – between the wars – it was actually dissolved, for reasons that have never been made clear, and stood abandoned. The records note building work in 1950 and 1966, but the real revival of monastic life began in 1957 under the Archbishop of Crete, Evgenios Psalidakis; a story told at the monastery has him fretting over how the work was to be paid for when a fair-haired young stranger arrived with an unlooked-for gift of money. From 1958 to 1978 nuns lived here under Abbess Synkletiki. In the 1960s the Archdiocese of Crete ran church summer camps and hostels at Gorgolaini – the “Paidoupoli”, or children’s town – which gave hundreds of children a summer in the hills each year and continued into the 1980s; part of the old service buildings was pulled down to make room for the new quarters, which is why the cells seen today are comparatively recent. In 1966 almost all the monastery’s land passed to the inhabitants of the neighbouring village, and the foundation lived on in altered form.

Where the name Gorgolaini comes from

The origin of the name is explained in more than one way. One derivation takes it from an epithet of St George, Gorgoeleimon, “swift to show mercy” – a saint, that is, who is quick to come to one’s aid. The other looks to the monastery’s spring: its water fills in no time the “lagini”, the large earthenware jug that Cretan dialect calls a “laini”, so that gorgo-laini would mean “he who fills the jug quickly”. This sits well with the older form “o Gorgos” and with the variant Vourvoulolaini, attested in notarial records of 1629–35, which alludes to the bubbling of the water. In the tradition of the monastery the two explanations stand side by side, joining the theological veneration of the saint to an observed peculiarity of the local spring.

Today Gorgolaini is once more an inhabited monastery for men. People come to pray to St George, to light a candle and to ask for help; the small brotherhood receives the pilgrims and keeps to the old order of worship. The liturgy is celebrated without loudspeakers or microphones and without electric light, which deepens the stillness and concentration of the place. The great feast days are 23 April, the day of St George – when it falls in Lent it is kept, by Orthodox custom, on Easter Monday – and 3 November, when the Church commemorates the translation of his relics.

Paths start nearby for the gorges of St Anthony (Agios Antonios) and St Charalambos, through which the European long-distance path E4 also runs, for the chapels of the Prophet Elijah and St Arsenios, and up to the mountain refuge at Prinos, at about 1,100 metres. The refuge, run by the Mountaineering Club of Heraklion since 1967 and sleeping thirty, stands among oaks some two hours on foot above Ano Asites and can also be reached by a dirt track; from it the E4 goes on to the Rouvas forest in about four hours and to the Nida plateau in about seven, and the summits of Koudouni and Gyristi are close at hand. The limestone hills all around are riddled with caves, among them a bat cave about 100 metres deep that shelters two protected species. A visit to the monastery can thus be combined with a walk across the eastern slopes of Psiloritis and with a stroll through Kato Asites, whose church of the Panagia is at least eight hundred years old – a village in which the memory of the Church, the history of resistance and the natural landscape form a single cultural whole.