This post originally appeared on my Tumblr.
Last week, I finished a walk I started two years ago. The story of that walk is on my YouTube channel. I’d had to turn back, because I ran out of water, just above this:
Katholiko monastery dates back as a place of worship to the eleventh century. It was abandoned because of pirate raids.
This photo is taken from opposite where I walked down. I came in through the arch towards the right of the picture. To the right of that is an entrance to a cave that contains a chapel. Moving leftwards, there are a couple of ruined buildings – the one further back has grass, sadly rather brown when I was there, growing on its roof. Then, at the left edge, is a bridge to nowhere, of which more later.
Alice and I were on holiday in Crete again recently and I was able to walk from Gouverneto monastery to the ruined (but not entirely abandoned) Katholiko monastery. This time I wore stouter shoes and took rather more water.
This photo is a reverse shot of the first, taken from before you walk through the arches.
Here is a shot from a different angle; the grass-covered building is in the centre of the image and just to the right are the entrance arches. A little further to the right is the entrance to the cave chapel. The whole place has a Indiana Jones feel to it.
From more or less the same spot, this shows the bridge I mentioned. I don’t really understand why the bridge is as it is; it has rooms of some sort, but it doesn’t go anywhere other than a cliff face on the other side. The construction is pretty solid and must have taken a lot of work to get all the stone down there. There is a riverbed under the bridge, dry when I was there, but the size of the bridge is disproportionate to what water might flow down there. My only guess is that it was built as a platform to allow outdoor services or gatherings, but I may be way, way off.
I hope that it and the next photo give some idea of its geographic location, on the side of quite a steep valley.
These are the stairs down from the path from Gouverneto. I presume that building materials would have had to have been carried down here from there; it took me about half an hour, as I recall. I walked down and then back up; I would not have liked to have carried a building’s worth of stone down.
A shot of the complex from a bit further back.
This link will take you to Google Maps and will hopefully give you a useful view of the lie of the land. It’s in the Google Earth 3D mode, with the path at left and snaking in to the bottom of the monastery.
I was really pleased to make it to Katholiko. I’d like to go back, and go all the way down to the sea, but it’ll have to be at a time other than high summer. I’m not very fit, it was somewhere above thirty degrees celsius, and it was humid. It took me a while to get back up to Gouverneto, and I had to stop three or four times on the way. The further up I went, the easier it became. I think that might have something to do with the humidity, as I was struggling to catch my breath when I took my first stop on the way back up. Going back out of summer would also hopefully mean more greenery around the monastery.
The pictures are all stitched together using the excellent piece of free software, Hugin. There are some more photos from this trip to Crete on this album on my Flickr (and have a look around for more photos in general!)