The Monastic Cult of Holy Women: A Case Study from Venetian Crete

Perhaps counter-intuitively, holy women are depicted in many monastic churches: the mosaics of the narthex at Hosios Loukas are far from an exception, as the study of late Byzantine painted churches reveals. The presence of images of holy women in the (mostly) male space of the monastery deserves further investigation. Their role within the liturgy is minimal, and models of female monastic conduct do not seem to appear more often in monasteries than in village churches or churches built by single families; furthermore, they sometimes appear in spaces that may not have been accessible to occasional female visitors, which forces us to look beyond the possibility that the images of these saints constitute the visual counterpart of the faithful. This paper aims to address these questions by looking at one church in Venetian Crete: the monastic church of Saint-Paraskevi-and-Saint-Panteleimon near the village of Galifa, a few kilometers south of Heraklion. The church, probably the metochion of a Cretan monastery, was built in two phases: the earlier one dates back to the late 12th or 13th century, and the western extension of the church has been dated to the 15th century. Both parts of the churches contain images of holy women: a portrait of an unknown saint (likely Saint Paraskevi) in the older part of the building, and a cycle of Saint Paraskevi's life as well as a series of medallion portraits of other female saints in the western part of the church. Looking at the pictorial context of these images, their connection with the liturgical furnishings of the building, and the integration of the church within the local sacred geography, the paper aims to determine the possible roles of the saint for the male community of the monastery.