Apodoulou – the “Cinderella village” of Amari

Apodoulou: a village on the southern slopes of Psiloritis

Apodoulou lies in the southern part of Amari, in what is known as the Ambadia valley, at 400 to 450 metres between Psiloritis and the Libyan Sea and a good 54 kilometres from Rethymno. Springs, gardens and old trees surround the village, which is known for its dry, healthy climate; from its edges the view runs far across the valley and down to the sea in the south. Olive oil, carob, honey and the produce of stock-breeding are the basis of life for its roughly 230 inhabitants. The name is derived from the ancient Greek word for a freed slave (apodoulos): the first settler, so tradition has it, was a slave ransomed from captivity among pirates who sought safety in the interior of the island. Venetian sources name the place in 1577 as “Nuphia et Apodholou” and in 1583 with 139 inhabitants. Archaeological finds show, however, that the district was inhabited long before the present village came into being – indeed from the Late Neolithic onwards – and that it commanded one of the main routes from Phaistos and the Messara to the north coast.

The story of Kallitsa Psaroudaki and the Frangiko Konaki

In the years of the rising against the Ottomans, in 1821, Kallitsa Psaroudaki, the eleven-year-old daughter of the village headman Alexandros Psarakis, was carried off by Ottoman troops passing through the district and taken to Egypt, where she was put up for sale in the slave market of Alexandria. There she was bought and freed by a member of the Hay family, Scottish landowners from Berwickshire, and brought up in the household, where she was sent to school to learn to speak and write English well. The best-attested version of the story identifies her husband as Robert Hay (1799–1863), who had served in the Royal Navy as a young man and visited Alexandria as early as 1818, and who later became a pioneering Egyptologist, recording the monuments of the Nile valley with a team of artists between 1824 and 1834; he married Kallitsa in Malta in May 1828. Village tradition, by contrast, remembers him as John Hay, an admiral of the British fleet, and the details vary from one teller to the next. On a voyage through the Mediterranean he brought her to Souda Bay and Chania, where Kallitsa met her father, who recognised her when she described their house and the carob tree in its yard. The English traveller Robert Pashley records that he met the couple at Apodoulou in 1834.

In 1844 Hay came to Apodoulou, and in 1846 he had a stone house built there for the family. A master builder from Karpathos is said to have raised it, using earth from Santorini for the mortar and roof tiles from Malta, with Kallitsa’s brother Stavroulios lending a hand, and her initials K.H. were set on the house. The villagers call it the Frangiko Konaki, the “Frankish mansion”, or the tower of Lady Hay. The building, intended as a summer residence, uses forms that draw on both British and Mediterranean architecture, and it became a defining part of the village scene. Kallitsa returned in the spring of 1847 with her two elder children and again several times in the 1850s; a portrait of 1848 by the Scottish painter Sir John Watson Gordon shows her with three of her four children.

Minoan Apodoulou

North to north-west of the village, about a kilometre away on a hillside at the place called Gournes, lies an archaeological complex of the Protopalatial period, dated to around 2000 to 1700 BC and regarded as one of the most important Minoan sites in western central Crete. The buildings are arranged in terraces on the slope; some thirty rooms have been uncovered – living quarters, workshops, storerooms – together with traces of administrative activity such as seal stones and sealed loom weights. Six building complexes have been partly revealed over an area of about 3,500 square metres; Complex A alone covers 225 square metres, and in one of its rooms more than 118 vases were found stacked beside a staircase, along with a potter’s wheel. The settlement was destroyed by fire at the end of the Protopalatial period and reoccupied in the Neopalatial. Spyridon Marinatos opened the first trial trenches in the 1930s, the German scholar Ernst Kirsten dug briefly on the southern part of the hill in 1951, and from 1985 to 2005 a Greek–Italian mission under Yannis Tzedakis and Louis Godart of the University of Naples laid bare the main settlement. The complex shows that the Amari valley, the natural passage between the north coast and the Messara with Phaistos, was bound into the economic system of Minoan Crete, standing roughly midway between the palace of Monastiraki, 18 kilometres to the west, and Phaistos, 20 kilometres to the south-east. The site is accessible as an open excavation, reached by a dirt track.

In the vicinity a domed tomb – a tholos – was investigated, with a long entrance passage, the dromos, some seven metres in length, and four clay sarcophagi; the chamber measures a little over three metres across and belongs to the Late Minoan period, around the 14th century BC. The larnakes, which had been overturned and bear painted mourning figures with raised arms, are now in the Archaeological Museum of Rethymno. Nearby stood a building of ritual character which Spyridon Marinatos discovered in 1934 and dated to the Neopalatial period, around 1600 BC. Among the finds are libation vessels of steatite, some bearing Linear A signs, a stone basin with an inscription, objects with inlaid work and a small golden double axe; they testify to the high standing of the people buried here and to the development of local craftsmanship.

After the Minoan period the valley did not fall empty: Roman and later finds show that life went on. The political centres shifted, but Apodoulou kept its importance as a settlement on the road between the mountain districts and the south of Crete, and the Venetian censuses of the 16th century find it still inhabited.

St George with the sword at Noufia

About a kilometre from Apodoulou, in the field called Noufia to the north of the village, stands the church of Agios Georgios Xifoforos, the sword-bearing St George. The single-nave, frescoed building, which is a listed monument, is associated with an old monastic establishment of the 12th to 13th century; local tradition places the present church in the 15th century. An inscription of 1496 names the Lourotos family and the donor Anastasios – an incompletely preserved line records the name of a priest Anastasios with the epithet “Istoriografos”, the painter – and later layers of painting show that the church was renewed at various times.

Churches and village life

In Apodoulou stand the parish church of St John the Baptist, the churches of St Nikolaos and St George, and the chapels of the Prophet Elias, All Saints, the Nativity of the Virgin and St Raphael. The parish church was begun in 1894 on the site of an older place of worship and completed in 1920 by the voluntary labour of the villagers; the church of St Nikolaos, probably of Venetian origin, was taken down and rebuilt in 1969. The patronal feast falls on 29 August, the day of the Beheading of the Baptist, when the village celebrates its panigyri, and towards the end of summer Apodoulou holds a wine festival. At the northern entrance to the village stands a stone fountain of the 19th century. The village, once the administrative seat for the surrounding settlements, had its school, local offices, post office and shops; so Apodoulou is not merely an archaeological site but a living village with its own ecclesiastical and family memory, and it combines easily in a day with Kouroutes, Fourfouras and the Minoan palace of Monastiraki further up the valley.