Venice’s Mediterranean Colonies: Architecture and Urbanism

This book examines the Venetian colonies of the Eastern Mediterranean and how their built environments express the close cultural ties with both Venice and Byzantium. Using the island of Crete and its capital city, Candia (modern Herakleion), as a case study, Maria Georgopoulou exposes the dynamic relationship that existed between colonizer and colony. She studies the military, administrative, and ecclesiastical monuments set up by the Venetian colonists which served as bold statements of control over the local Greek population and the Jewish communities who were ethnically, religiously, and linguistically distinct from them. Georgopoulou demonstrates how the Venetian colonists manipulated Crete’s past history in order to support and legitimate colonial rule, particularly through the appropriation of older Byzantine traditions in civic and religious ceremonies.