Qualla: Heraklion

Heraklion: Introduction

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gsimonov, CC0. The siege lasted twenty-one years. From 1648 to 1669, Ottoman forces ringed the walled city of Candia - what Heraklion was called when Venice ruled it - while inside the bastions, Cretan defenders, Italian mercenaries, and increasingly desperate citizens held out behind walls in places forty meters thick. By the end, 70,000 Turks were dead, along with 38,000 Cretans and slaves, and 29,088 of the city's Christian defenders. It was the longest siege in recorded history at that point. When the Albanian grand vizier Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed Pasha finally walked through the gates, he found a hollow shell. The Venetian walls he had spent two decades trying to break still stand today, ringing the old city, with their seven bastions intact - the most complete Venetian fortifications anywhere outside Italy.

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Image: Gsimonov | CC0

Heraklion: A City of Many Names

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Anna.Tsolidou, CC BY-SA 4.0. Few cities have changed names as often as this one. In Minoan times the harbor served as the port for Knossos, three kilometers inland. In Roman and early Byzantine centuries it shrank to a coastal village. Then in 824, Andalusian Arabs expelled from Iberia by the Emir of Cordoba...

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Image: User:Anna.Tsolidou | CC BY-SA 4.0

Heraklion: Knossos on the Outskirts

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Theofanis Ampatzidis, CC BY-SA 4.0. Five kilometers south of the modern city center sits Knossos, the largest center of Minoan civilization and, by many counts, the oldest city in Europe. People have lived continuously around Heraklion since at least 7000 BC, which makes the wider region one of the deepest layers o...

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Image: Theofanis Ampatzidis | CC BY-SA 4.0

Heraklion: Venetian Stones, Cretan Renaissance

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vgargan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Venice bought Crete in 1204 as part of the messy aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, and held it for more than four hundred years. The walls you see in Heraklion today are largely their work. So is the Koules Fortress guarding the harbor entrance, the Loggia where Venetian nobles co...

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Image: Vgargan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Heraklion: Earthquakes and War

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0. Crete sits on a tectonic boundary, and Heraklion has paid the price more than once. An earthquake on October 12, 1856, destroyed all but eighteen of the city's 3,600 homes and killed 538 people. Then in May 1941, German paratroopers dropped on Crete in the largest airborne invasi...

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Image: Zde | CC BY-SA 4.0

Heraklion: Kazantzakis and the Modern City

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frente, CC BY-SA 3.0. Up on the Martinengo bastion, looking south over the city, sits the grave of Nikos Kazantzakis. The simple wooden cross marks the resting place of the man who wrote Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ. The epitaph he chose for himself is one of the most quoted lines...

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Image: Frente | CC BY-SA 3.0