National Hellenic Museum: Venice, Crete, and the Birth of the Modern World
Earlier today — Wednesday, April 26, 2023 at 6:00 p.m. ET — I attended the webinar Venice, Crete, and the Birth of the Modern World hosted by the National Hellenic Museum (NHM) in Chicago, IL. I previously attended another NHM event, Tragedy, Comedy, & Democracy in Ancient Athens, held earlier this month. Just like last time, the fast-paced and occasionally humorous talk was given by Dr. Katherine “Katie” Kelaidis, director of the museum.
Dr. Kelaidis explained that as an island “closer to Jerusalem than to Paris”, Crete is a crossroad between the East and West. The largest island in the Mediterranean served as a stop for traders and militaries, leading to influence from cultures in the Middle East and Ethiopia. The culture has been part of the Greek world for thousands of years. The Minoans, who were Pre-Indo-European settlers of Mediterranean islands, lived in Crete until the Greeks pushed them out of the area in 900 BC during the Greek Dark Ages. Later, during the 11th century, the Byzantine Empire ruled over Crete. This empire found itself pressured from other military powers, including Genoa and Venice in the West and the Ottoman Empire in the East.
During this time, Italian traders created a commercial revolution, as they want spice trade routes connecting their city-states to the East. Western European countries like France and England were in a continual state of war, limiting their ability to trade, and spices were worth more than gold. An opportunity came in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, when the Western Christian crusaders raided and captured Constantinople. During this time, Boniface of Montferrat became temporary ruler of the Duchy of Candia, another name for Crete. He soon sold the land to Venice, which would rule the island for the next four hundred years.
The Cretans had mixed feelings about this takeover and launched a series of rebellions against Venice. The islanders did not want to become an independent country but instead wished to rejoin the Byzantine Empire. Unfortunately for them, the empire fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453. The Cretans stopped revolting, as they preferred that the Byzantine Christians rule their island rather than the Ottoman Muslims. Dr. Kelaidis noted that some historians believed the treatment of the Cretans by the Venetians was unusually good for the time, as its rulers allowed Cretans to keep their land, permitted marriage between Venetians and Cretans, and accepted traditional cultural practices, such as worshiping in the Eastern or Orthodox branch of Christianity. In fact, modern DNA tests show that about a third of Cretan men carry a Y-chromosome from Venice, meaning they have at least one male Venetian ancestor.
While some historians emphasize the peaceful coexistence of two branches of Christianity, Dr. Kelaidis believed the Venetians did not view Cretan worship practices as different from their own. The division between the Roman Catholic Church of the West and Orthodox Church in the East was not yet clear despite the Schism of 1054 and the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In fact, Venice had a unique position in medieval Christianity. The Archbishop of Venice served under the Pope of Rome while receiving special privileges from the Patriarchate of Constantinople. She found evidence of confusion over the divide in other church histories, including early Norse chronicles. Authors believed the Schism of 1054 was a temporary misunderstanding or argument, which church leaders had resolved. Dr. Kelaidis proposed that many Christians did not recognize the Schism of 1054 until after the Protestant Reformation.
This overlap or syncretism of religious beliefs is evident in Cretan art and modern religious practices in both Venice and Crete. Iconography from Crete uses the Venetian Renaissance style, and figures appear more realistic than the Middle Byzantine style found in other Orthodox churches. Some icons even depict Purgatory, a concept from Catholicism. The Baroque painter El Greco, born to a noble Cretan family in 1541 and taught in a Venetian school, brought this blended style to Toledo, Spain as an artist patronized by the Spanish royal family. In Venice on Good Friday, members of the Catholic church carry the epitaphios, a cloth embroidered with the dead body of Christ, in a parade through the streets, a practice typically found in the Orthodox church. Even today, Orthodox Cretan laypeople say the Catholic rosary in Greek.
By the 17th century, Venice had declined in power and could no longer hold off the Ottoman Empire in Crete. The island remained under Ottoman control until the 20th century, when the empire collapsed after losing World War I along with Germany. Afterwards, Crete rejoined Greece, although their culture and language are distinct. Cretan Greek includes loan words from Venetian and retains older forms of words and sentence structure found in Byzantine Greek, just as Appalachian English is more like Shakespearean or Early Modern English than other English language dialects.
Just like the first webinar, Dr. Kelaidis used a mix of slides, fast facts, and humor to explain a complex topic that I had never considered. I look forward to the next talk hosted by the National Hellenic Museum and sponsored by the National Hellenic Society in Chicago.