Sunday 5th March marked the “Triumph of Orthodoxy”, a feast celebrating the restoration of the icons to the Orthodox Church following successive periods of iconoclasm in the Byzantine era. According to Wikipedia: “After the death of the last iconoclast emperor, Theophilos, his young son Michael III, with his mother the regent Theodora and Patriarch Methodios, summoned the Synod of Constantinople in 843 to bring peace to the Church. At the end of the first session, all made a triumphal procession from the Church of Blachernae to Hagia Sophia, restoring the icons to the church. This occurred on 11 March, 843 (which that year was the first Sunday of Lent). The Synod decreed that a perpetual feast on the anniversary of that day should be observed each year on the First Sunday of Great Lent, and named the day ‘the Sunday of Orthodoxy’.”

The Byzantine tradition is very strong at Kolymbari’s Monastery of Panagia Odigitria Gonia, where celebrations on the Sunday of Orthodoxy take place with “Byzantine pomp”, according to an article in the Haniotika Nea (04-03-23) . “Panagia Odigitria”, the Virgin as Guide, is a reference to an iconographic depiction of the Virgin Mary holding the child Jesus at her side while pointing to him as the source of salvation for humankind. In the Western Church this type of icon is sometimes called Our Lady of the Way. The term Gonia, which means “corner” in modern Greek, refers to the monastery’s position in the south-east corner of the Gulf of Chania

Originally founded in the 9th century and dedicated to St George, the monastery was formerly situated at Menies on the Rodopou peninsula, on the ruins of the ancient temple of Artemis Britomartis (Diktynna). As a result of constant attacks from pirates, in the 13th century the monks moved southwards, and a small monastery dedicated to St George was built at a site on the hillside behind the current monastery complex, which is now the latter’s cemetery. The small surviving church has excellent murals from the 14th and 15th centuries which were discovered under multiple layers of plaster during renovations carried out by the Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities.

The new monastery of the Virgin Odigitria Gonia was founded on its current site by the Cypriot Monk Vlasios in the early 17th century. On his death the work was taken over by the monk Benedictos Tzagarolas and a Chania nobleman, Giorgos Moumouris, who contributed a significant fortune to the project. It was built between 1618 and 1634 with Venetian influences in its architectural design and adornments. A distinctive fountain in the monastery’s courtyard was built in 1708, and the belfry was added in 1849.

An artistic tradition which began with the wall paintings in the small monastery church of St George was continued in the following centuries, when the art of wall paintings in Crete was displaced by the use of portable icons. These were created by major Cretan artists (including Dominikos Theotokopoulous, later to become famous as El Greco), and a large number of them were accumulated at the Gonia monastery.

“These important relics,” the article in Haniotika Nea says, “follow the progress of the Cretan School, which in difficult times for the Greeks ‘carried the burden’ of religious art not only in the wider world of Orthodoxy but in the West as a whole.” These icons, together with other valuable relics and a richly stocked library, are displayed in the monastery’s Museum, which is jointly managed with the Metropolitan See of Kissamos and Selino and was inaugurated in October 2018 by the Ecumenical Patriarch.

The museum is housed in a large vaulted basement area formerly used to store agricultural equipment and produce. It was originally built to create a level base for the steeply sloping site, on which the rest of the monastery complex was built. It has been set up at considerable expense to create a welcoming space for visitors and is well worth exploring.

The first room contains a series of large tableaux representing the development of monasticism in the area of the Rodopou peninsula and the history of the Gonia Monastery through its centuries of existence. The following rooms contain mainly portable icons displayed in chronological and stylistic order, presenting the development of Cretan art, especially in the Chania area, from the 15th to the mid-19th centuries.

Among them are two works of Andreas Ritzos, one of the most famous pioneers who shaped the tradition of the Cretan School. There follow numerous works by Chania icon painters of the 17th century, which show strong influences from Flemish engravings. The artists represented include Konstantinos Palaiokapas, Isaias, the monks Neilos and Parthenios who may have been attached to the monastery, and other anonymous figures.

The tradition’s continuation in the 18th century is represented by the icon painter Georgios Stais from Kythera, others whose place of origin is unknown such as Dimitrios Sgouros and Konstantinos Papadopoulos, and other anonymous artists. With works also from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the examples of graphic art shown in the museum follow the development of the Cretan School from the beginning to the end.

The other rooms contain manuscripts and rare editions from the Library, valuable vestments, amongst which an antimension (a form of altar cloth) with the signature of the Cretan Patriarch of Alexandria, Meletios Pigas (served 1590-1601), and objects of metalwork and wood sculpture such as blessing crosses, gospels and other sacred utensils from the many centuries of the Monastery’s existence.

The fine quality of the works makes the museum one of the richest in the ecclesiastical sphere in Crete, the article in Haniotika Nea concludes, adding: “The complex’s Renaissance architecture, faithfully restored in the past few decades in collaboration with the Metropolitan See of Kissamos and Selino and the responsible Archaeological Service, acquaints visitors with an important facet of Cretan ecclesiastical culture.”

Among the restoration works carried out was the re-rendering of the external façades, a substantial task which was completed shortly before the Holy and Great Synod of the Orthodox Church, held on the premises of the Monastery and the adjacent Orthodox Academy of Crete in June 2016.