History

The occupation of the Crete by the Venetians started in 1212 in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders of the 4th crusade in 1204.

The Venetians for a couple of centuries relied on the protection of the old Byzantine fortification on the hill Castello, close to the port. This part was the nucleus of the Venetian city which expanded eventually outside the old fortification.

Venice took the decision to build a new fortification in Chania in 1538 after the devastating raid of the Turkish pirate Barbarossa in the Agean and in Crete. The project was assigned to Michele Sanmicheli. The construction finished in 1568.

The fortification did not stop the Turks who in 1645 invaded Crete and after a 56 days siege captured Chania with heavy losses.

Structure, Fortification & Buildings

The layout of the fortification is almost a regular quadrangle, the north side of which was the jetty.

The perimeter was 3085m. The western wall is the best preserved, while the eastern one is also preserved almost along its entire length. The southern part is not saved. Not even the north, which was basically the outer fortification of the port.

The walls had 4 bastions, at the four corners. On the bastions there were also secondary bastions, the revelini. The 4 bastions, all of which are preserved, are:

• In the NW corner, the San Salvatore or Venier or Griti bastion with the Revelino San Salvatore (photo 5-7).
• In the SW corner, the Schiavo or San Dimitrio bastion with the characteristic Lando circular revelino (photo 9,10).
• At the SE corner, the Santa Lucia bastion with the Revelino Santa Lucia (photo 11).
• In the NE corner, next to the port, the bastion Sabionera (“of the Sand”) or Monecigo with the Revelino Michel (photo 1-4).

In the middle of the south side of the wall there was a piattaforma (= platform) which was essentially a fifth bastion of the land wall. Above it were two bastions, the Della Mantona and the San Giovanni.
The piattoforma and its bastions no longer exist, they were demolished together with the rest of the southern wall in 1911. In their place is today the Municipal Market. The demolition materials of the bastion and the soil that was removed to level the area were used to fill up the eastern moat.

On the jetty there was another bastion with an unusual elongated shape, the bastion of Agios Nikolaos, which protected the port. A large part of it was demolished some decades ago, but some of its remains are preserved (photo 13).

Two more characteristic parts of the Venetian fortification are:
• The Genoese tower (photo 15). It is preserved half-destroyed behind the fortress of Firkas. It must have been built during the short period of Pescatore 1206-1210. It was later incorporated into the complex of Venetian fortifications. Next to the tower there is the Monastery of San Salvatore which gave its name to the adjacent bastion.
• The tower of the Egyptian lighthouse at the edge of the jetty (photo 14). The tower and the lighthouse were built by the Venetians during the period when the rest of the fortifications were being built, at the end of the 16th century. The lighthouse tower consists of three parts. The base is octagonal, the middle part hexagonal and the third circular. The lighthouse is called “Egyptian”, because it was repaired by the Egyptians, in the period 1830-1840 when the governor of Egypt Mohamed Ali had taken Crete as a reward for his help (to the Turks) during the Greek war of Independence.

The Venetian walls were protected by a dry moat 1942m long, 10m deep and 50m wide.

The fortification of the Venetian walls of Chania had 3 main gates, none of which survives. The most important was the Rethymno Gate (Porta Retimiotta) on the south side, west of the piattaforma.
Another gate was on the east side of the wall. It was the gate of the Sand (Sabionera), near the bastion of the same name. On the west side was the Porta San Salvatore. Both of the last two gates were protected by square towers.
In addition to the 3 main gates there were several other smaller ones.

The siege of Chanea by the Turks, in 1645, from the Historia della guerra di Candia by Andrea Valiero, 1679