Maroulas: a Venetian village of towers above Rethymno

Maroulas – a Venetian village under protection

The village was founded by the Venetians in the 13th century, and its buildings have kept their original form. Like a museum in the open air, it carries the visitor back to the days of the Serenissima. The lanes are exceedingly narrow, and the family arms of the former owners are displayed on the fronts of the houses, above arched doorways. Maroulas sits on a naturally defended rise between two stream valleys; the view runs out over the olive groves of the coastal plain to the Sea of Crete, and is at its widest from the church of the Prophet Elias – a situation that persuaded the Venetian nobility to build their country seats here. The place is mentioned in writing from 1577.

Towers, doorways and manor houses

Two watchtowers of the Venetian period survive, both later used by the Turks; the Venetians put up other battlemented buildings beside them. The rectangular structures, built between the 14th and the 16th centuries, were dwelling and fortress in one: a battered base, a stone string course running round the walls, loopholes, waterspouts and a projecting box machicolation over the door. The larger tower, of three storeys, whose height is given as 44 metres, commanded the plain as far as the north coast; after the Ottoman conquest of about 1646 a garrison was stationed in it. The municipality of Rethymno repaired it in the 1990s. On account of these tower houses Maroulas has been compared with the villages of the Mani and with San Gimignano in Tuscany.

Around the towers crowd massive manor houses with cisterns in their courtyards, loopholes and elaborately framed doors. There are said once to have been twelve round-arched stone gateways, the ‘portares’ – one for each of the twelve seigneurial houses. Among the finest buildings is the ‘Despotiko’, the summer residence of Metropolitan Timotheos Veneris – the bishop who restored the church at Arkadi in the 1920s and founded the monastery’s museum in 1933 – with its arched entrance picked out in colour. Then there are old olive presses and no fewer than fourteen churches and chapels, the oldest of which are said to go back before the 13th century.

The spring and the name of the village

According to tradition the village owes its name to a shepherdess called Marouli, or Maroula, who discovered a spring of cool water while minding her sheep. The Venetian fountain with its stone arch, shaded by an ancient plane tree, is still there. Near Maroulas there is also a grove with a mineral spring whose water, local belief has it, aids the digestion and cures disorders of the bowel.

After 1922 refugees from Asia Minor were housed in the empty homes of the Muslims who had left; after the Second World War the village emptied almost completely. Today the old houses are being carefully restored one by one, a few tavernas and coffee houses have opened, and anyone who walks the quiet lanes late in the afternoon will have the towers, coats of arms and archways almost to themselves. Buses from Rethymno are few, so a car is the practical way up. The detour combines easily with the neighbouring village of Adele and with Arkadi Monastery.