The Kornaros icon
Sixty-one small scenes on one panel, needing time to read.
Wouter Hagens — CC BY-SA 3.0 · C messier — CC BY-SA 4.0 · C messier — CC BY-SA 4.0 · C messier — CC BY-SA 4.0
**A monastery that looks more like a fort than a church** — a blank stone block in the middle of a completely barren plain in the far east of Crete, without a tree around it. Its name explains its shape: **top** is Turkish for cannon — it was called this because it had one, to defend itself against pirates. Its walls are thick, its windows few and high, and it has a single door. Its history is a sequence of violence: it was **plundered and burned repeatedly** over the centuries, its monks hanged at its gate more than once, and in the **Second World War** it served as a base for the Cretan resistance, hiding a secret transmitter; when it was discovered, the abbot was executed. In its church hangs the most famous icon in Crete: **"Great Art Thou, O Lord"** by **Ioannis Kornaros** (1770) — a single panel containing **61 separate small scenes**, each finely detailed and needing time to read. ✅ There is also a **museum** of icons, manuscripts and inscriptions, an **olive press**, and a shop selling the monastery's own oil and wine.
Sixty-one small scenes on one panel, needing time to read.
A stone block with few high windows and one door on a barren plain.
The monastery's press and the shop selling its own oil and wine.
Toplou, 72300 Sitia, Lasithi, Crete
**Do not try to see all of it — read five scenes properly and you will understand the whole panel.** ✅ **What it is**: painted by **Ioannis Kornaros** in 1770, its subject is an Orthodox hymn sung at **Epiphany** («Great Art Thou, O Lord») — and the painter turned **every phrase of the hymn into a depicted scene**, so the single panel became an ordered sequence of 61 small pictures. ✅ **How to look**: **go close** first — from a distance you see coloured confusion, from close up you see a world. Then **pick one corner** and follow its scenes in order: you will find the creation, rivers, angels and animals, each the size of a palm and astonishingly detailed. ✅ **And hunt the small things**: ships, fish, and faces the size of a lentil with features on them. ⚠ **Do not photograph it** — photography is forbidden, and in truth **a photograph cannot carry it**: its small scale and density do not survive a screen.
**Because they genuinely were — this is not an architectural metaphor.** ✅ **The first reason: pirates.** The eastern Mediterranean was a raiding ground for centuries, and monasteries were **rich** (land, oil, grain, silver vessels) and **isolated** on coasts and plains — ideal targets. So they were built with thick walls, high windows and a single door that closed, and **some owned a cannon**, as here. ✅ **The second: resistance.** Under Ottoman rule the monasteries became **organising centres** for Crete's repeated revolts — weapons stored, insurgents meeting — which made them military targets in turn. That is why **Toplou was plundered and burned repeatedly** and its monks hanged. ✅ **The third: refuge.** When an expedition came, whole villages fled to the monastery — so it needed walls, water and stores. ⚠ **Hence the recurring pattern**: **Arkadi**, **Preveli**, **Gouverneto**, **Toplou** — all fortified, and all with a siege story.