Polyrrinia: the Dorian hill city above Kissamos Bay

Polyrrinia: the ancient city on the hill

South of Kastelli, the modern Kissamos, the road climbs in easy bends through Palaiokastro and Grigoriana to the village of Polyrrinia (Πολυρρήνια). After about seven kilometres – some forty-three from Chania – it ends below a steep conical hill a little over 400 metres high, on whose slopes the houses of the small village are knitted into the remains of one of the most important cities of ancient western Crete, second in rank only to Kydonia. The ancient town occupied roughly ten hectares, laid out in a horseshoe around the summit, and had been settled since the Late Minoan period, but Polyrrinia proper was a Dorian polis which, according to the geographer Strabo, was founded by Achaeans and Laconians: they gathered a population that had hitherto lived scattered in villages into a single fortified place, built facing south. Its harbour of Kissamos, down on the bay, tied the mountain community to the sea lanes, and at times Falasarna on the west coast served as a second port; at the height of its power the city’s territory ran from the north coast of the island to the south.

Polis, alliances and a coinage of its own

The history of the site reaches back into prehistory, even if direct archaeological evidence for those early centuries is still thin; the settlement was certainly occupied from the Early Iron Age, around the 11th century BC, and in the Archaic period it ranked alongside Lato and Prinias among the significant towns of the island. The city attained its greatest political weight in Classical and Hellenistic times, from the 4th century BC onwards. It maintained relations with Sparta, Melos, Rhodes and Thebes, with the Ionian coast and with Egypt, and belonged to the Cretan League of the Hellenistic period; on Crete itself it was the rival of the nearby trading harbour of Falasarna and of its powerful neighbour Kydonia, the modern Chania. Polybius records that in the civil war of 220 BC the Polyrrinians abandoned Knossos and took the side of Lyttos, helping to prevent Knossos and Gortyn from dominating the island. Like most Cretan cities, Polyrrinia was governed as an aristocracy on the Spartan model: at its head stood elected magistrates, the kosmoi, flanked by a council and an assembly of the people, and the young were led into citizenship through a strictly ordered system of ephebes.

From the 4th century BC until well into the Roman imperial age Polyrrinia struck its own coins. They show Zeus Kretagenes, the “Crete-born” Zeus, and on the other face a bull’s head, the bucranium that served as the city’s emblem. Such a coin was not merely a means of payment but a declaration of independence: whoever minted was telling the world that he was his own master.

When the Romans subdued Crete in the 1st century BC, in the campaigns of 69 to 67 BC, Polyrrinia took no part in the resistance of the other cities and surrendered without a fight. Its friendliness towards Rome paid off: the town was spared plunder, and it honoured the conquering general Quintus Caecilius Metellus with a statue whose inscribed base still survives. Under the new rule it enjoyed a period of remarkable prosperity, and most of the finds now visible on the hill date from Roman times.

With control of the Diktynnaion the influence of Polyrrinia reached far beyond its own hill. The sanctuary linked the city to the religious and the commercial routes of Crete and gave it a further source of wealth. The town hill itself was also regarded as holy ground: many of its stones carry the scratched names of pilgrims who sacrificed to the gods up here. Local tradition adds a Homeric footnote – Agamemnon is said to have anchored nearby on his way home from Troy, and the sacrifices he began and had to break off have gone down as the proverbial “Cretan sacrifices”.

Acropolis, walls and water supply

The acropolis stood on the summit of the hill. The surviving fortifications belong to quite different ages: the ancient walls of the 4th century BC and of the Hellenistic period, strengthened with semicircular and polygonal towers, were rebuilt again and again by Romans, Byzantines and later by the Venetians, and in places the ancient masonry still stands between three and five metres high. Because the steep ground allowed no regular town plan, the inhabitants cut their houses in terraces into the slope; often about half of a house is hewn out of the living rock and only the front is built of masonry – these rock houses can be made out all over the area of the town to this day, and a Hellenistic guard tower survives in the village square. On the lower slope, north of the present village and outside the walls, lie the rock-cut chamber tombs of the Hellenistic necropolis, some carved above and some below ground level, whose forms recall models from Alexandria. From there come funerary epigrams in verse, moving laments for the dead set in stone.

The water supply holds a special place. Underground galleries driven into the rock in two arms collected the water and led it into hewn basins and cisterns; an overflow with a removable barrier diverted the surplus into a further reservoir, and clay pipes connected the underground tanks with one another. In its present form the installation is usually attributed to the Roman period, quite possibly to the reign of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138), when the supply was improved; a semicircular tower of that epoch, at the entrance to the village, guards the outlet. The most astonishing thing of all is that the system still carries water.

From Saracen devastation to Byzantine rebuilding

Medieval tradition connects the destruction of the city with the raids of the Saracens, who conquered Crete in the 9th century. In the 10th century, after Nikephoros Phokas had won the island back in 961, Polyrrinia was refortified as Byzantine rule was consolidated: on the Hellenistic acropolis rose a Byzantine castle whose walls, in places still 3.5 metres high, crown the summit to this day. The Venetians, who took the island in the 13th century, kept the place as a stronghold and in their turn reused the older masonry. The archaeological landscape through which the visitor walks today therefore consists of superimposed layers of history – and anyone who looks closely can read from the cutting of the stone and the mortar which hand built where.

The church of the Holy Fathers

On the site of an ancient sanctuary – a Hellenistic temple or monumental altar of the 4th century BC, a large religious building probably dedicated to Artemis – the villagers in 1894 built the little church of the Holy Fathers (Agii Pateres). The ashlar blocks of the ancient structure served as building material, and ancient inscriptions of the 3rd to 1st centuries BC are set into the walls, so that the church wall itself has become an archive in stone. It is dedicated to the ninety-nine God-bearing Fathers of Crete, ascetics gathered around St John the Hermit, whose memory has stayed alive in local Orthodox tradition. Not far away the remains of an Early Christian basilica can be seen. The first excavations on the hill were undertaken by the Italian archaeologist Federico Halbherr, and the Greek archaeologist V. Theophanidis continued the work in 1942–44, uncovering a place of worship and parts of the cemetery; systematic investigation by the Greek Archaeological Service has been under way since 1986.

The Sirikari Gorge

At Polyrrinia the Sirikari Gorge (Sirikariano Farangi) begins – or ends, depending on which way one walks. The gorge itself is about six kilometres long and takes some two and a half hours, with a difference in height of only 170 metres and an easy, waymarked path; its upper reaches are famous for a forest of tall chestnut trees, with holm oak, cypress and plane along small streams and waterfalls, and water runs in the bed until spring, with springs along the way through the walking season. Beside the path lie springs, small hamlets and the churches of the Holy Apostles – a 15th-century Byzantine building in Sirikari village – and of the Panagia, which stands among the chestnuts and keeps its feast on 15 August; two old watermills survive at the nearby hamlet of Sineniana. Two arms of the gorge, the Tsichliano to the west and the Koliano to the east, which is also simply called the Sirikari Gorge, unite at Polyrrinia and so join the nature walk to the ancient city, an old bridge marking the point where the ravine opens out. The usual way is to walk down from the mountain village of Sirikari, some seventeen kilometres south of Kissamos, and finish the walk among the ruins.

Notes for the visit

The excavated area is freely accessible. Cars are best left just beyond the taverna at the top of the village. From the village square a signposted footpath leads up to the acropolis in about half an hour, past stretches of wall, the Roman cisterns and a small chapel; there is scarcely any shade up top. Spring, when the slopes are green and flowering, is the kindest season, and early morning or late afternoon the kindest time of day. The climb is rewarded with a sweeping view over the Bay of Kissamos, the peninsulas of Gramvousa and Rodopou and, on a clear day, across to the Sea of Crete in the north and to the White Mountains in the south.

A visit to Polyrrinia gathers into a single circuit what elsewhere would require several destinations: an ancient acropolis, Roman engineering, Byzantine and Venetian fortifications, an Orthodox church built of ancient stones and a mountain gorge. These are not remote ruins but a landscape in which the story of the city carries on in the present-day village and in its church life.