Where is located Monastery Agia Triada Tsagarolon
The monastery of Agia Triada of Tsagarolon is one of the richest, most impressive, the largest and most beautiful monasteries in Crete. Located about 20 km northeast of Chania town, in the peninsula Aktorini, near the airport of Chania, in the position Tzobomylos of the Cape Melecha and at the foothills of Stavros Mount.It is surrounded by large fields planted with olives groves, vineyards and cypress. The entrance of the monastery is impressive and here stops a road with huge cypress trees. The facade of the church has double columns of Ionian and Corinthian style and bears an inscription in Greek, which is dated to 1631 with features of Renaissance architecture and some subsequent additions.
History of Monastery Agia Triada Tsagarolon
According to the tradition that is also confirmed with documents from the archives of Venice, it was built by the brothers Ieremias and Lavrentios Tsagarolon - from whom took the name- that came from a great Venetian-Cretan family and had a powerful influence on the Orthodox population and the Catholic Venetians.Ieremias was a famous scholar of his era with rich education and was a friend of the Patriarch of Alexandria, Meletios Pigas. Ieremias himself was a candidate for Patriarch of Constantinople. Moreover, Jeremiah designed and built the monastery complex of the monastery, being affected by the architect Sebastiano Serlio from Verona, Italy.
The monastery today hosts a small museum with various pictures and icons. In the collection of the museum, the visitor can see elements that remained from the holocaust of the Abbey in 1821, icons, ecclesiastical utensils, crosses, vestments, manuscript documents, books (among them gospels from the period 1568-1758).
The most magnificent building of the monastery is certainly the church of Agia Triada (Holy Trinity), in the center of the courtyard. It belongs to the "three niches" architectural style, with a dome and chapel on the ground level and the upper level.
The ground plan follows the typical "Agioritiko" tradition (Athos Monastic style in North Greece), while the morphological elements can be linked to western ecclesiastical architecture.
From the original decorations, only the icon screens from the ground floor chapels were saved, while the icon screen, icons and the general equipment of the church date from around the middle of the 19th Century. The gold-plated woodcut icon screen is an exceptional interest piece due to its pictorial construction which followed the Cretan traditions of its era, with evidence of Baroque influence. Most of the icons on the icon screen can be credited to the known artist of the time, Mercurios from Santorini, who followed the style of the post-Byzantine technique.