The story
In 2004 a Baptism of Christ by El Greco came up for sale, and people across Crete set about buying it. Children, union members, businesspeople and churchgoers gave money, church leaders urged donations, and banks lent the rest. The panel, painted around 1567, now hangs in the Historical Museum of Crete in Heraklion, beside his View of Mount Sinai from around 1570. They are the only works by El Greco on the island where he was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos, both from the years when the young painter left Crete for Venice and then Rome.
The museum was founded in 1953 by the Society of Cretan Historical Studies and occupies the neoclassical house of the Kalokairinos family, since extended. Its subject is Crete from early Christian times to the Second World War, so the rooms move from Byzantine sculpture, wall paintings and icons to coins, jewellery and textiles, and to a detailed model of Venetian Candia, as Heraklion was then called. Another room holds the study and library of the novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek, brought from his house in Antibes in France.
