The Jewish cemetery

We are standing now at the centre of what used to be a walled area which housed the city’s Jewish cemetery. During the 19th and 20th century, the city’s Jewish population might have been small, amounting to only a few hundred people, but the community had been present in the area for centuries. According to testimony, the Jewish quarter and cemetery had been around since at least the 14th century and the island’s Venetian period.

So, even though the number of its members never rose above the hundreds, the Jewish community had a long, uninterrupted presence in the city. The space occupied by the cemetery might have appeared large relative to the size of the Jewish community, but it probably indicated long-term planning since the Jewish religion does not allow for the exhumation of remains.

There is testimony that, during the German occupation, non-Jewish locals were encouraged to destroy part of the cemetery. Several gravestones were smashed with sledgehammers. The marble pieces were used as building materials in Nea Chora and beyond. To this day, excavation projects in the city unearth fragments of Jewish gravestones. 

In May 1944, on a Saturday morning, the Jewish residents of the city were arrested en masse. They were kept in the Agia Prison for a few days and were then loaded on the ship Tanais at the port of Herakleion, along with Christian resistance fighters and Italian prisoners of war. The ship departed for Athens, but a few hours later, was torpedoed by a British submarine and sank. None of the prisoners survived.

After the displacement of the Cretan Jews and before people were even aware of their tragic fate, trespassing on the cemetery became common practice. Illegal shacks were immediately erected, a situation which was essentially legitimized when the Central Jewish Council of Greece (KIS) decided to sell off the land to the trespassers at a low price in the 1950s.

The only reference to this past is a plaque in the courtyard of the 6th Elementary School of Chania, which mentions that the site was ceded by the Central Jewish Council of Greece. Until the mid-1960s, local children used to play around ‘Sultana’s grave’, the only remnant of the site’s original use. Sultana, daughter of the Sarfatis family, died during the occupation at the age of 16. She was buried on what today is part of the school’s yard.

Map