Qualla: Arkadi Monastery https://qualla.com/arkadi-monastery en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:30 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/3/8/arkadi-monastery-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Arkadi Monastery https://qualla.com/arkadi-monastery Arkadi Monastery: Introduction https://qualla.com/arkadi-monastery/ Photo credit Aeleftherios, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the morning of November 9, 1866, the people sheltering in the powder magazine at Arkadi could hear the Ottoman troops at the door. Most were women and children. They had taken refuge in the monastery three weeks earlier, bringing their valuables, hoping the thick walls and the stone bell tower would shelter them. Now the walls had been breached, the men outside were dead or dying, and a Cretan named Konstantinos Giaboudakis stood with a torch over barrels of gunpowder. What he did next made Arkadi a name known across Europe and turned a quiet sixteenth-century monastery on a Cretan plateau into a place that has been understood, ever since, as a wound.

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/3/8/arkadi-monastery-wp/sw38-arkadi-monastery-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Arkadi Monastery: The Plateau Below Mount Ida https://qualla.com/arkadi-monastery/ Photo credit Olivier Teyssandier, CC BY-SA 4.0. Arkadi sits 23 kilometers southeast of Rethymno, on a fertile plateau 500 meters above sea level on the northwest slopes of Mount Ida. Crete's tallest mountain rises to the south. Vineyards and olive groves cover the surrounding hills; pine, oak, and cypress mark the gorges that ...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/3/8/arkadi-monastery-wp/sw38-arkadi-monastery-the-plateau-below-mount-ida.mp3 0:06 2 full Arkadi Monastery: Renaissance Behind a Fortress Wall https://qualla.com/arkadi-monastery/ Photo credit Lapplaender, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The current church was built between 1562 and 1587 under the hegumen Klimis Chortatzis, from the same Rethymno family that gave Crete its great Renaissance poet, Georgios Chortatzis, author of Erofili. The building is a Renaissance Revival basilica with two naves: one dedicated t...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/3/8/arkadi-monastery-wp/sw38-arkadi-monastery-renaissance-behind-a-fortress-wall.mp3 0:06 3 full Arkadi Monastery: Two Centuries of Occupation https://qualla.com/arkadi-monastery/ Photo credit Aeleftherios, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Ottomans took Crete from Venice in 1669 and held it for two and a half centuries, longer than the United States has existed. The Cretans rose against them again and again. The London Protocol of 1830 freed mainland Greece but explicitly excluded Crete. By the 1860s, the islan...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/3/8/arkadi-monastery-wp/sw38-arkadi-monastery-two-centuries-of-occupation.mp3 0:06 4 full Arkadi Monastery: Three Days, Two Decisions https://qualla.com/arkadi-monastery/ Photo credit Aeleftherios, CC BY-SA 3.0. The siege began on November 7. The Cretans inside, commanded by Ioannis Dimakopoulos under the moral authority of the hegumen Gabriel Marinakis, had been advised by a career military officer named Panos Koronaios that the monastery was not defensible. They had decided to defend i...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/3/8/arkadi-monastery-wp/sw38-arkadi-monastery-three-days-two-decisions.mp3 0:06 5 full Arkadi Monastery: The Choice in the Powder Room https://qualla.com/arkadi-monastery/ Photo credit Aeleftherios, CC BY-SA 3.0. What Konstantinos Giaboudakis did is impossible to think about clearly, but it has been thought about for a hundred and sixty years. He set fire to the powder. The explosion killed nearly everyone in the magazine - estimates of the dead inside Arkadi over the three days run to ro...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/3/8/arkadi-monastery-wp/sw38-arkadi-monastery-the-choice-in-the-powder-room.mp3 0:06 6 full Arkadi Monastery: The World Looks at Arkadi https://qualla.com/arkadi-monastery/ Photo credit Lapplaender, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. What Giaboudakis and the others may not have known was how widely the news would travel. Victor Hugo wrote letters from exile, published in the Trieste newspaper Kleio, comparing Arkadi to the Destruction of Psara and the Third Siege of Missolonghi. Giuseppe Garibaldi wrote in su...

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]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/w/3/8/arkadi-monastery-wp/sw38-arkadi-monastery-the-world-looks-at-arkadi.mp3 0:06 7 full