Agios Georgios-Falandra

The Church of Saint George at Falandra is a fortified ecclesiastical relic, standing beside the car park for the Phaistos archaeological site on the western flank of the Minoan palace hill. What survives is a 16th century Venetian-era monastic compound, though its origins reach back to the 10th century, when the hermit Osios Ioannis Xenos founded the original monastery. Of that first foundation, only a single water tank remains. The Venetian construction was itself largely undone in 1821, when Ottoman forces destroyed the monastery in the turmoil following the outbreak of the Greek revolution on the mainland. Today the church, with its defensive elements, and the scattered ruins around it speak to a turbulent history layered over a far older sacred landscape. It is a modest but evocative spot, where Byzantine asceticism, Venetian military architecture and the violence of the War of Independence all left their mark.