Chania: the Venetian harbour city on the site of ancient Kydonia

Chania (Χανιά) is the second-largest city of Crete and the chief town of the regional unit that bears its name; the municipality counted some 111,000 inhabitants at the 2021 census. The Venetian harbour with its 16th-century lighthouse, the tangle of lanes in the old town, the covered market and the Archaeological Museum give the city its face.

Chania: the city on the natural harbour

Chania is the second city of Crete and the administrative seat of the regional unit of the same name, as well as the most important town in the west of the island; until 1971 it was the capital of all Crete, before that role passed to Heraklion. It grew up around a natural harbour on the site of ancient Kydonia, about 40 kilometres as the crow flies from the western tip of the island, and it still joins harbour life, residential quarters and a historic centre into a single whole. The Venetian harbour with its lighthouse, the labyrinth of old-town lanes, the market hall and the Archaeological Museum show it to be not merely a resort but one of the great historic centres of Crete. The airport lies 14 kilometres away on the Akrotiri peninsula, and the ferry port at Souda Bay about 7 kilometres to the east.

The name Kydonia belongs to an important Minoan palatial centre that stood on the hill of Kastelli above the harbour; people had settled there as early as the Neolithic, no doubt because of the sheltered position, and the hill has been continuously inhabited for roughly 5,000 years. The name appears as ku-do-ni-ja on Linear B tablets, Homer speaks in the Odyssey of the Kydonians on the banks of the river Iardanos, and the quince – the “Kydonian apple” – is named after the city. According to legend Kydon, a son of Minos, founded the city; other ancient writers make him the son of Hermes or Apollo and of Minos’s daughter Akakallis, and the city’s coins show the infant Kydon being suckled by a Cretan hound. The archaeological finds – among them burial pithoi from the period around 1750 to 1650 BC and Mycenaean chamber tombs with their grave goods – attest an unbroken development of the settlement from prehistory through the Greek period into Roman times. Since 1969 a joint Greek–Swedish excavation on Agia Aikaterini Square, begun by Yannis Tzedakis and long directed on the Swedish side by Erik Hallager, has uncovered houses destroyed by fire around 1450 BC and again around 1200 BC, an archive of 97 Linear A tablets, the second largest known, five Linear B tablets, and the celebrated “Master Impression”, a clay sealing that shows a walled city with a double gate on a rocky shore. When the Romans conquered Crete in the war of 69–67 BC, Kydonia is traditionally said to have been the first city to resist. Modern Chania is thus a place where no layer has entirely displaced the one before it; each has kept its traces, and a large part of the Minoan centre still lies unexcavated beneath the houses.

The names Kydonia and Canea

In the ancient sources the city is Kydonia. The Venetians called it La Canea, a name which over time passed into the Greek Χανιά. These are not two different cities but the successive historical names of one and the same settlement. Where the later form comes from is disputed: scholars have proposed an Arabic coinage from the years after 828, when Saracen conquerors laid the town waste, a derivation from an old quarter of the town or from the god Velchanos, and a Venetian corruption of an earlier name. During the Ottoman centuries the town was known in Turkish as Hanya.

The Venetian harbour and the old town

The most coherent historic ensemble in Chania took shape under Venetian rule, which lasted from 1252 to 1645. After the Byzantine reconquest of 961 the Byzantines had already walled the hill of Kastelli and made the town the seat of a bishop; the Venetians rebuilt the city in 1252 as part of a planned wave of colonisation – some 10,000 Venetians are said to have settled in the first century – strengthened the walls, laid out the harbour, built the shipsheds known as the Neoria and created the street grid with its main axis, the Corso. In the 16th century, from 1538, the circuit of walls was renewed to plans by the Veronese military engineer Michele Sanmicheli, with four bastions and several gates; stones from a Roman theatre were built into them. Only the eastern and western stretches of this circuit survive. The town then had about 8,000 inhabitants and was the second city of the island after Candia. At the harbour mouth stands the stone lighthouse: its core goes back to the Venetian structure of the end of the 16th century, built between about 1595 and 1601 on the natural rock as an open beacon, while its present shape – an octagonal base, a hexagonal middle and a round upper storey, with an internal stone stair that recalls a minaret – comes from a rebuilding in the first half of the 19th century, around 1839. The tower is 21 metres high and its lamp stands 26 metres above the sea; it is reckoned among the oldest surviving lighthouses in the Mediterranean. In time of siege a chain was stretched from its foot across the harbour mouth to the Firkas fortress opposite.

Along the waterfront seven Venetian Neoria survive – roofed halls in which galleys were repaired and built. Originally there were many more: Venice ordered their construction in 1467, the first two were finished in 1526, and by 1599 the southern range numbered seventeen, of which nine were later pulled down; a further group of five, the Moro arsenals, was begun at the eastern side of the harbour in 1607, and two of these still stand. The harbour is said to have held up to forty galleys. Close by are the Firkas fortress, built by the Venetians around 1620–1629 at the north-western corner of the harbour to guard its entrance and today home to the Maritime Museum of Crete, the Küçük Hasan mosque and other buildings which recall the changing masters and the changing functions of this city harbour. The quarters of Splantzia with its plane-tree square, Topanas – whose name derives from the Turkish tophane, the Venetian powder store that stood there – and the Jewish quarter preserve the irregular ground plan of the old town.

What the Neoria were

The Greek word νεώρια means ship-arsenals or dockyards. They were no mere warehouses: the long, vaulted stone halls – on average about 50 metres long, 9 metres wide and 10 metres high, with arched openings connecting one to the next – sheltered the ships from the weather and made it possible to keep the war fleet of the Republic of Venice in repair. Under Ottoman rule, when the harbour silted up and lost its naval role, they were turned into military stores; the westernmost of them, the Grand Arsenal, now houses the Centre of Mediterranean Architecture.

The Ottoman period and the memory of the city

After a siege of two months Chania fell to the Ottomans on 22 August 1645, the first great prize of the Cretan War, and many buildings were given a new purpose. The church of St Francis became the mosque of Yusuf Pasha, the church of St Nicholas in Splantzia the Sovereign’s Mosque, and the Küçük Hasan mosque, also called the Yali Tzami or Shore Mosque, rose on the harbour front in 1645 as the mosque of the garrison; its minaret was taken down in 1939, and in later years the domed building served in turn as an archaeological museum, a store, a folk museum and an exhibition hall. Baths and fountains were added, and the pasha of Crete took up residence in the town. These changes did not wipe out the inherited fabric of the city but laid a further religious and administrative layer over it.

The market hall and the modern centre

The municipal market of Chania was built between 1911 and 1913 on the Piatta Forma bastion, at the seam between the old town and the new quarters. Its cruciform plan was laid out for rows of butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers and other traders: the hall covers about 4,000 square metres, has a door at the end of each of its four arms and holds 76 shops, with the butchers in the eastern and western arms, the fish stalls on the western side and fruit and vegetables to north and south. The market became a fixed part of daily life in the city and keeps alive Chania’s link with the countryside of western Crete. Not far away lies the Public Garden, laid out as early as 1870, with its clock tower of 1924–1927.

The Archaeological Museum in Chalepa

The new Archaeological Museum of Chania opened on 16 April 2022 in the historic district of Chalepa, at 15 Skra Street, replacing the old museum that had occupied the former Venetian church of St Francis on Chalidon Street since 1962. The building, designed by Theofanis Bobotis and partners, offers nearly 6,000 square metres of exhibition space on a plot of 12,000 square metres and includes a lecture theatre for 120, conservation laboratories and rooms for educational work. The permanent exhibition occupies three halls on the ground floor and one upstairs and brings together some 4,100 finds from various parts of the district of Chania and from the island of Gavdos – from the Palaeolithic to the Roman period. Separate sections are devoted to Kydonia, the Minoan palatial centre, to trade, to religion, to burial customs and to everyday life; the upper floor holds the Mitsotakis collection, donated to the Greek state by Konstantinos and Marika Mitsotakis, which spans the fourth millennium BC to the third century AD and is shown here in its entirety for the first time.

Why the museum matters for an understanding of Chania

The exhibition presents history not as a catalogue of individual monuments but as the development of a whole region. Objects from settlements, sanctuaries and cemeteries – the Linear A and Linear B tablets from Kastelli, the coins of Aptera and Kydonia, the reconstructed house destroyed in the earthquake of AD 365, the sculptures from the Asklepieion of Lissos – help to tie the modern city to the archaeological landscape of western Crete. Touch tables and Braille labels make part of the display accessible to visitors with impaired sight.

What to see in Chania

The best place to begin a walk is the harbour, continuing along Chalidon Street, which leads to Syntagma Square – the old Santrivani Square with its fountain, whose name comes from the Turkish word for a fountain – and into the old town. After that one can visit the Maritime Museum of Crete in the Firkas fortress, the Neoria, the market hall and the Archaeological Museum in Chalepa; the museum stands about two kilometres east of the harbour, an easy walk along the shore or a short bus ride. The old town is best explored on foot and early in the morning, before the lanes fill. In this way the route links maritime history, the architecture of several eras and the daily life of present-day Chania.

Chania has remained a living city and not a museum backdrop: Venetian walls stand beside Ottoman buildings, neoclassical houses, markets, cafés and residential quarters, and the quarter of Nea Chora beyond the western walls, the oldest part of the modern town, dates from the early 18th century. This juxtaposition of the ages gives the city its particular character.