For more than four hundred years, the island of Crete was a crucial node of the Venetian maritime empire, granting Venice control over major trade, military, and pilgrimage routes in the Eastern Mediterranean. Venetian rule on the island unfolded through different phases and modes of coexistence. Traditionally, historiography has emphasised a long period of relative stability and cultural growth—the so-called Cretan Renaissance—between the fall of Constantinople and the Ottoman conquest of the island in 1669. Yet the final centuries of Western control were marked not only by enduring transcultural contacts, but also by frictions and ongoing negotiations of identity.
Ruling as a powerful minority, Venetian authorities relied on strict systems of governance and direct administration to maintain control over the territory, especially in the face of the growing Ottoman threat. In this talk, I will focus on deliberate sonic strategies that shaped practices of control and coexistence. Shared liturgical ceremonies, civic rituals, festivals, and processions functioned as forms of sonic propaganda, making Venetian authority audible and structuring urban space and time.
At the same time, the regulation of sound reveals how Greek-speaking communities negotiated, adapted to, or were compelled into forms of sonic coexistence. Greek Orthodox rituals and vernacular sound practices were selectively tolerated, restricted, or silenced, turning listening itself into a site of negotiation and asymmetrical power relations. Attending to sound and noise thus allows us to trace both Venetian political strategies and the lived experience of coexistence in colonial Crete.
Alexandros Maria Hatzikiriakos is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie / UKRI Horizon Guarantee Fellow at the University of Sheffield, where he leads the project Sonic Identities in Early Modern Crete and Cyprus (1453–1700): Acoustic Communities at the Interface of Venetian Colonisation and the Ottoman Empire. Until 2025, he was a Research Fellow at the School of History at the University of St Andrews, working on the AHRC-funded project Italian Renaissance Objects and Spaces of Encounter. He has previously held research fellowships at I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the University of Verona, and Sapienza University of Rome.
