Crete-Discover the Unknown Crete

Xepatomeni (bottomless), sacred to Athena
and Artemis who, as the legend goes,
bathed their divine bodies here.
The city declined after the Roman
conquest but acquired new importance
during the Byzantine period, when it
became the seat of the bishopric of Kamara:
of that era there remains the little church of
Ayios Nikolaos of the tenth or eleventh
century, with rare frescoes from the
iconoclast period when the ecclesiastical
authorities forbad the physical
representation of sacred images.
At the beginning of the thirteenth
century the Genoese and Venetians fought
for possession of the coast and initially the
Genoese, led by the gentleman-pirate Enrico
Pescatore, prevailed. Pescatore erected the
castle of Mirambelo, promptly destroyed by
the Venetians to whom the island of Crete
was assigned by the treaty of Adrianoupoli
in 1204.
Hurriedly reconstructed, the castle was
briefly occupied by the Turks in 1645, then
The small church of
Ayios Nikolaos
dating from the
tenth or eleventh
century
Lake Voulismeni
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