Sights - Chania Prefecture

Imbros village

 

If you follow the road southwards from Askyfou you will soon come to the village of Imbros, situated on another small plateau.

Before the village - at the road leading to Asfendou - you pass through an area called Fantása which should be haunted by ghosts and evil spirits.
At the entrance to the village is a double-naved church to Koimisis tis Theotokou (The Passing Away of Virgin Mary).

At the top of the hill behind the church are some remains of a Turkish castle.

In the southern part of the village stands another church to Agios Konstantinos and Eleni.

Next to the church is a small enclosure with three busts of well-known village inhabitants plus a memorial tablet for those who were killed in World War II.

The inhabitants make a living by sheep-breeding and agriculture (grain and wine) and some tourism from the visitors to the Imbros gorge.

 

 

The founders of the village named it after their birthplace. On the island of Imbros, close to the Dardanelles in the northeastern Aegean Sea, lived seven brothers, who were sentenced to death. The Sultan's wife intervened before the sentence was carried out, so instead of getting killed they were sent into exile. They went ashore at Loutro a little west of Chora Sfakion and founded Imbros.

 
The brothers were nicknamed Pattakos (patasso = suppress) because of their hot-headed and violent temper. Later the name became a common surname.

 
From this family came among others Manousos Pattakos (Manousakas), who participated in the rebellion of Daskalogiannis. The rebellion was suppressed in 1771, but 3 years later Manousakas gathered a number of armed men on Askyfou, from where they went down to Embrosneros on the Apokoronas peninsula to kill the notable farmer and janizary Ibrahim Alidakis, who had raised an army in order to purloin the Cretan shepherds' pastures.

Alidakis' "Pyrgos",
from Robert Pashley´s book

 

 

 

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