Fortezza of Rethymnon

On your left is a massive stone fortress wrapping around a rocky promontory, punctuated by a smooth spherical dome rising above its irregular defensive walls. This is the Fortezza, which simply means fortress in Italian. It was built by the Venetians in the late sixteenth century, and it stands on a hill called Paleokastro, or old castle.

The Venetians originally tried to protect the city with a different set of walls starting in fifteen forty, but they learned a harsh lesson. Those earlier walls were weak, and when the Ottoman admiral Uluç Ali Reis attacked in fifteen seventy-one, the city was easily captured and sacked. After that disaster, and with the recent loss of Cyprus, Venice decided Rethymno needed serious protection. It was their third most important city in Crete, after Heraklion and Chania.

So, they brought in a military engineer named Sforza Pallavicini. He designed this new citadel using the Italian bastion system. A bastion is essentially an angled, projecting piece of a wall that lets defenders fire in multiple directions at once, eliminating blind spots. Building it was a monumental undertaking. If you look at your screen, you can see a long stretch of these formidable walls. To construct this perimeter of thirteen hundred and seven meters between fifteen seventy-three and fifteen eighty, it took the grueling labor of exactly one hundred and seven thousand, one hundred and forty-two Cretans, alongside forty thousand, two hundred and five animals. They kept very detailed records.

The original plan was to move the entire town inside these walls for safety. But once built, they realized the Fortezza was too small to hold everyone. So, it just became a secure neighborhood for the Venetian administration, while the regular citizens remained vulnerable down below. Ironically, the fortress itself was never truly secure. It lacked a defensive ditch, and its protective upper walls were strangely low.

When the Ottomans returned in sixteen forty-six during the Fifth Ottoman-Venetian War, the townspeople fled inside the Fortezza. But disease, starvation, and a lack of ammunition quickly took their toll, and the Venetians surrendered in just a few weeks. The Ottomans moved in and tweaked the architecture. They built a ravelin, which is a triangular outer wall to protect the main gate, and they converted the Venetian Cathedral of Saint Nicholas into a mosque. You can check your app to see the Sultan Ibrahim Mosque and its striking dome today.

Over the centuries, the Fortezza evolved. By the early twentieth century, it was packed with residential houses, and at one point, it even held the local prison. After World War Two, the city expanded, the residents moved out, and the modern houses were demolished to preserve the historic structures.

Today, the site is proudly managed by the Ministry of Culture and is open to the public daily from ten in the morning until eight at night. Take a moment to appreciate this immense achievement of engineering. When you are ready, we can head to the next stop.