Krousonas – a pirates’ village in the mountains?

Krousonas: the story of a mountain village and its memory of resistance

There are several accounts of how Krousonas came by its name. Some take it back to ancient Greek – to “krouseis”, the blows with which the Kouretes, the mythical guardians of the infant Zeus on Mount Ida, clashed their weapons and shields together, so that the village would be “the place of the blows”; or to an ancient town called Krousson, where Dionysos is said to have been worshipped. Others think of the Cretan “koursos” and “koursevo”, to plunder: islanders still say “the village is krousos” of a place that lies empty and abandoned. Popular tradition turns this into corsairs who settled in the mountains once their raiding days were done. Local people also remember an older name, “Kyria Gonia”, which describes the village’s position in an angle of the hills. Whatever the truth, the form has been stable for a long time: the Venetians wrote Chrussona and Crussona, and the census of 1881 gives Krousonas as it is spelt today.

Krousonas is one of the largest mountain villages in Crete. It lies 21 kilometres south-west of Heraklion, some eleven kilometres by road from Anogeia, at a height of about 450 to 460 metres on the eastern foothills of Psiloritis, and spreads like an amphitheatre over three hills – Plagia, Koupos and Livadiotis. Its territory is large, some 65 square kilometres running up to the high pastures, with about 1,500 hectares of woodland. The population reached its peak of 2,974 in 1961; the municipality still reckons on close to 3,000 residents, though the census of 2021 counted 2,094, and they live for the most part from farming and stock-raising – cheese and other dairy produce, apples, pears, walnuts and prunes. From Koupos, to the south of the village, the view opens over the green valley of Malevizi. As early as 1906 the archaeologist Stefanos Xanthoudidis noticed the walls of an extensive settlement there; the investigations that began in the 1980s established a place inhabited for more than a millennium, from Late Minoan and Mycenaean times down to the Hellenistic period. The history of the present village, however, is bound up above all with the Middle Ages and with stubborn, unbroken resistance to foreign rule.

Under Venice

Krousonas appears in the written sources as early as 1280, when an inhabitant of the “Casale Cunsiona” is named, and again in 1341 as a fief of the Venetian nobleman Marco Giustiniani; other accounts point to a deed of 1374 drawn up by the notary Leon Marcello. The scholar Francesco Barozzi lists the place in 1577 as “Chrussona”. Venetian documents and the register of 1583 known as the “Kastrofylakas”, which enters “Crussona” with 262 inhabitants, preserve the names of villagers and the details of their compulsory labour – on the fortifications of Chandax, today’s Heraklion, among other works. Surviving wine presses, defensive structures and other buildings confirm the standing of the village under Venice.

Krousonas under the Ottomans and in the uprisings

In 1645 and 1646, as the Turks set about conquering the island, a great massacre took place at a spot called Karamera, not far from the village; the severed heads of the Christians are said to have been displayed in the surrounding villages as a warning, and a folk song keeps the memory of it. The villagers responded by flatly rejecting every demand of the conquerors, and in the end refused to pay the crushing taxes. To collect what they held the village owed them, the Turks sent troops. The attempt was a complete failure: the villagers had word of the approach, laid an ambush and put the soldiers to flight.

Once the Turks saw that force achieved nothing, they turned to negotiation and asked what the villagers wanted. The answer was to be freed from taxation and not to have Turkish settlers imposed on the village. Both demands were not merely conceded but set down in a formal firman of 1647: Krousonas was declared a vakuf village, whose sole obligation was to maintain the mosque of Sultan Ibrahim in Heraklion. And indeed for a century no Turk lived in the place. Only around 1750, after disturbances, was a bey installed as administrator, and by 1821 some fifteen Turkish families were living here. The Christian population nonetheless kept growing: the census of 1881 records 1,269 Christians, and by 1900 there were 1,753 inhabitants.

The twin-aisled principal church in the upper part of the village dates from the late Venetian period and was originally called “Afentis Christos”, Christ the Lord; it is under that name that the church register of 1635 lists it. A single broad arch divides the two aisles. Ottoman consent was needed for any work on it: on 15 March 1745 Metropolitan Gerasimos petitioned the authorities for leave to make good damage done by bad weather, and in 1815 the villagers again obtained permission to repair the building – according to tradition on condition that they finish within three lunar months, failing which it would become a mosque. When plague swept Crete in 1817 and Krousonas was spared – local tradition adds that the Turkish residents died while not one villager fell ill – St Charalambos became the patron saint. Since then one aisle has been dedicated to him and the other to the Transfiguration of Christ, which is celebrated on 6 August with the blessing of the first grapes.

During one of the uprisings three hundred Turks were burnt in this very church, having fled into it with the insurgents at their heels. To escape destruction they seized as a hostage the son of the local “prokritos”, the village elder – tradition has it that he was a monk – and threatened to kill him unless they were allowed to withdraw. The insurgents resolved not to let the trapped men go. What settled the matter was the consent of the father himself, who gave them a free hand with the telling words: “If it is his fate to die for his country, then let him die.” The fighters then broke a hole in the roof, threw in combustible material and rags soaked in oil, and set the church alight. Those who were not burnt and rushed out into the open ran straight into the villagers and were killed on the spot. The elder’s young son – he is known as Tsounias or Kritsotakis – was found beheaded on the altar. A marble plaque on the church gives the date 18 July 1822 and speaks of three hundred Turco-Albanians burnt; local historians put the number at 370 soldiers, of whom only two are said to have survived, and at about 25 Greek dead.

It was amid these events, as part of the Revolution, that the Greek insurgents fought a major battle against Hasan Pasha in June 1822 in the Krousonas Gorge, the ravine that opens three kilometres west of the village between the summits of Voskero (1,197 metres) and Gournos (1,293 metres). Some four hundred Turks fell. The pasha, enraged, had the village burnt and the monks of the monastery of St Irene murdered. In the rising of 1866 Krousonas again stood in the front rank, and once more houses and churches went up in flames. Not for nothing is it known as the “captains’ village” of Malevizi, and its fighters as “hainides”, the Cretan word for the outlaws who took to the mountains.

Krousonas in the years of the German occupation

In the years of the German occupation the men of the village went, as they always had, up into the mountains. Even before the paratroopers landed, the British archaeologist and officer John Pendlebury – vice-consul in Heraklion and a captain in military intelligence, recognisable by his glass eye and the leather-covered swordstick he carried – had chosen Krousonas as a base and had rifles distributed; the village was the home of Kapetan Satanas, with whom he planned attacks on the flanks of the German parachutists, and one of only two places, the other being Anogeia, from which the Nida plateau could be reached. At the end of April 1941 a hundred armed men of Krousonas marched up to Nida, where boulders were laid out to prevent German aircraft from landing. Pendlebury was killed in the first days of the Battle of Crete and lies in the war cemetery at Souda Bay. The village is especially proud of an exploit that it hands down in these terms: on 7 December 1943 the German commander-in-chief of all forces on Crete and seven senior Italian officers were taken prisoner and smuggled out to Egypt. The organisers of this bold enterprise are named as Xylouris, the doctor Alekos Ieronymidis and the priest Papa-Giorgis Vergetakis, who are honoured in Greece as national heroes.

Krousonas today

Today Krousonas is a quiet but lively village of squares, kafenia and views towards the foothills of Psiloritis. It has nine churches, and more than twenty chapels are scattered over its countryside. Two of the churches deserve particular attention: that of St John the Theologian and the church of the Archangel Michael (Ekklisia tou Michail Archangelou), with its highly idiosyncratic architecture. Older than either is the Panagia Kera on a natural rise, whose first aisle goes back to the second Byzantine period (961–1204) and preserves remains of frescoes; a second aisle, dedicated to the Dormition, was added in 1977, the year 1818 cut into the base of the belfry records a rebuilding, and until 1888 this was the cemetery church. Its bell, whose sound carried far across the valley, once gave warning of Turkish raids. Legend makes the bell the gift of a Russian princess in 1674 and tells how the Turks threw it down a well, where a Turkish shepherd found it forty years later. On the main square stands Agia Triada, the largest church in the village.

Village life revolves around this square. It is here that the cultural association – “Nea Genia”, founded in 1975 – holds the apple festival every September, for apples, pears and other fruit thrive on the well-watered Livadi plateau at 920 metres, nine kilometres west of the village along the road that climbs beside the gorge; the plateau is at its best in spring, when the orchards are in blossom, and the old chapel of Agios Ioannis above it commands a view of Heraklion that has earned it the name “the veranda of Crete”. Walkers can take the waymarked path through the gorge itself, five kilometres long with a climb of some 650 metres, for which three hours should be allowed; after heavy winter rain the path may be damaged. The women’s cooperative “I Krousaniotissa”, founded in 1999 and the first agricultural women’s cooperative in the district, makes pastries, pasta and preserves to old recipes. The Thyrathen museum of traditional musical instruments, founded here in 2012 and holding one of the largest collections of its kind on the island, moved its displays to the middle of Heraklion at the end of 2023, so that a visit in Krousonas has to be arranged in advance; three stone fountains dating from before 1900 complete a walk round the village. The most important sight in the surrounding area, however, is the monastery of St Irene, which lies on the mountainside a few kilometres above the village.