Heraklion exhibition presents 30 years of photography from Crete’s Sfakian Madares

A photography exhibition documenting the Sfakian Madares, a remote mountain region of Crete’s White Mountains, opened at the historic Church of Agios Petros of the Dominicans in Heraklion, Patris reports. The Archbishop of Crete, the Region of Crete’s governor, deputy governors, institutional representatives and members of the public attended the opening.

Titled “APOCOSMOS – Outside the world and time: Sfakian Madares, the Wild West of Crete,” the exhibition features photographs by Giorgos Patroudakis, a journalist and photographer from Sfakia who has documented the area for 30 years. According to Patris, turnout at the opening was large and emotional.

The exhibition is a post-festival event of the Region of Crete’s Crete Festival 2026, co-organized with the Archdiocese of Crete, the Agios Dimitrios parish, the Ephorate of Antiquities of Heraklion and the Municipality of Sfakia. Vangelis Zacharis, the Region’s festival coordinator, and Sfakia Mayor Yiannis Zervos gave welcome remarks describing the exhibition’s significance, while Ioanna Giannari, the Crete Festival’s planning and curation coordinator, presented and moderated the event.

A guided tour of the “Alpine” landscape

Patroudakis led an interactive tour of the exhibition, responding to questions from Giannari and from attendees. Patris reports that several visitors said the photographs, with their interplay of grey rock and pink light across the terrain, resembled paintings rather than photographs.

Patroudakis said APOCOSMOS does not aim only to reveal the hard-to-reach beauty of one of Crete’s most inaccessible places. He said it also seeks to make known the natural and human heritage of the Sfakian Madares, raise awareness of the fragile balance of this landscape, and support efforts to protect and promote it internationally.

A landscape studied by international researchers

According to Patroudakis, the Sfakian Madara lies at the heart of the White Mountains’ mountain labyrinth and is a site of extreme natural beauty with archaeological, architectural and folklore significance that has drawn international scientific interest for decades despite remaining unknown to most visitors. The region’s bare conical peaks, sinkholes, chasms and cave systems have been studied by university researchers Oliver Rackham and Jennifer Moody, who note that comparable landscapes do not exist elsewhere in the northern hemisphere. Visitors interested in the island’s wider network of gorges in Crete can find similar high-mountain terrain across the White Mountains range.

Further down the slopes, centuries-old cypress trees, some more than a thousand years old according to the same researchers, have been described as among the oldest trees in Europe. Patris reports that an ancient pastoral culture continues to survive in this environment, with the photographs documenting the daily life and work of the Madarites, traditional cheese-making, and dry-stone structures known locally as koumi, mitata and tyrokelia, some of which are still used for their original purpose.

Thanks and upcoming travel to Chania

Closing the tour, Patroudakis thanked Region of Crete governor Stavros Arnaoutakis and the co-organizers, including Archbishop Evgenios, festival coordinator Vangelis Zacharis and the Mayor of Sfakia, as well as attendees who supported the exhibition. Patris reports that the exhibition will run daily, including weekends, from 10am to 2pm and 5pm to 10pm, until November 4.

Patris adds that the exhibition has already drawn visitors of all ages, with particular interest from teachers planning to bring students. Attendees named by Patris as congratulating Patroudakis included Archbishop Evgenios, Region governor Stavros Arnaoutakis, deputy governor Georgos Pitsoulis, festival coordinator Vangelis Zacharis, deputy governors Georgia Milaki and Nikos Xylouris, Sfakia Mayor Yiannis Zervos, Mylopotamos Mayor Georgos Kladas, and other academics, researchers and cultural figures.

After its run in Heraklion, the exhibition organized by the Region of Crete’s festival will travel to Chania, where it will be shown from November 8 to 28 at the Yali Tzamisi and Megalo Arsenali venues, around the same period as the Chania Film Festival. For the first time, the exhibition will be split into two separate but complementary sections: “Outside the world” at Yali Tzamisi, focusing on the mountain desert and Europe’s oldest trees, and “Outside time” at Megalo Arsenali, focusing on the human history of the Sfakian Madara.