We have limited evidence of the icono-
graphic art of the Greek Asia Minor because
most of it was eradicated by the continuous
uprooting and conversion of the Christian
population. The few remaining examples
in the churches and buildings of the Greek
Patriarchate in Constantinople are insuffi-
cient to provide a complete picture. In the
rest of Asia Minor (today’s Turkey), there is
little to remind us of the once strong pres-
ence of Hellenic culture. The churches
and monasteries were either converted to
mosques, left to become stables for animals,
or destroyed completely.
Greek museums (the Benaki, the Byzantine,
the Kanelopoulos museums in Athens and
the Byzantine Museum in Thessaloniki),
as well as several private collections have
become the repositories of icons and other
objects that were brought to Greece when
refugees from Asia Minor arrived at the
beginning of the 20th century.
Some icons and liturgical objects have
inscriptions that place them comfortably
within the sphere of the Greek East, while
we can surmise that others belong to that
group because of their association with
known styles or other telltale characteristics.
These objects are mostly of later production,
generally dating to the early 18th to the late
19th century.
The Greeks of the East remained close to
their Byzantine visual traditions. The simi-
larities with the art of the Cretan school
were due to their common origin rather
than to imitation or direct influence of the
art of Crete. This remained true until the late
17th century, when the rigor of its Byzantine
origins became attenuated, in time acquir-
ing influences from the pictorial arts of
26
ICONS OF THE HELLENIC WORLD
the East: for example, uncommonly large
eyes, disproportionately large heads, and
perfectly Persian-looking horses. From the
West, influence arrive through woodcuts
and copper etchings contained in West-
ern religious publications. The volume
of art produced in these areas seems to
have been very considerable, and to have
surpassed the output of even mainland
Greece.
In the Near East, the artistic traditions of the
Orthodox populations, including many who
spoke Greek, underwent a similar transfor-
mation as those of the Asia Minor Greeks,
i.e., from strict adherence to the Byzantine
visual art, to the assimilation of Eastern
elements, and finally to the emergence of
local decorative elements borrowed from
the East as well as the West. However, in the
icons of the Near East, Palestine, Lebanon,
Syria, and Egypt, we see a greater assimila-
tion of the idioms of Cretan art, often inter-
mixed with distinctly Eastern elements.
The year 1669 was crucial for the Vene-
tian-occupied island of Crete, the place
that had given refuge to Byzantine artists
more than two hundred years earlier, when
Constantinople fell to the Ottoman armies.
After a siege that lasted nearly twenty-five
years, the Christian bastion of Crete finally
succumbed to the might of the Ottoman
Empire. The story of the icon painters on
Crete repeats that of the Byzantine artists;
as the Ottoman armies took Candia, these
artists fled to the Venetian-occupied Greek
Islands of the Ionian Sea: Corfu, Kefalonia,
Zakynthos, and other smaller isles. Here they
established the Ionian School of painting,
which continued the strong contacts with
the Greek communities in Venice and the
rest of Italy. The transition from the Cretan