AN ANCIENT CHURCH ON THE BEACH

A boat trip takes us back a thousand years to the eve of the crusades

A short note tonight as I have promised my children faithfully that I will not work on holiday. So it’s a photo caption, really. But I hope the photo is worth it.

This is a tiny tenth-century church dedicated to St Paul the Apostle, perched on the beach in southern Crete which is now named for the same saint: Agios Pavlos.

Paul needs, I should think, no introduction. The saint who built the church from stones that lay on and around the shore is less well known.

He was St John the Stranger, born on Crete shortly after the Byzantines conquered the island from the Arabs in 961. This was the time when the crusading movement was taking intellectual and military shape across the Mediterranean, a generation before Urban II preached the First Crusade and formally invested land-grabs with the dignity of religious duty.

John the Stranger seems to have spent around half a century proselytising and building churches around Crete, one of which is this small, cross-shaped building decorated inside with thirteenth-century wall-paintings. On a day where the temperature was tickling 45 degrees, it was humid inside, and the pages of a service-sheet, evidently recently used, were curling and smudging in the heat.

.Here’s a more general view. As you may be able to tell, this is not a sterile monument but a living place of worship.

Even peeping out of the window is lovely.

I had a great time, anyway.

Should you be thinking of visiting Agios Pavlos, the best way to get to the beach is by boat from the southern port-town of Sfakia. There’s a snack bar on the other side of the beach from the church. I gather that the owner is named Paul, since he was baptised in the church.

Okay, that’s all for now. Normal service will be resumed soon.

Dan x

PS If anyone was wondering, I have just finished reading the variously collected essays and lectures of Jonathan Sumption. The final instalment of Sumption’s five-volume history of the Hundred Years War comes out in a few weeks. It is an indispensable guide to that conflict and the starting point for all scholars and researchers. But Sumption’s writing on history, law, the UK constitution, Brexit, Covid, etc is well worth a look. Clarity of thought and economic elegance of prose like you wouldn’t believe.