The historical collection includes coins, weapons- guns, Cretan knives, pistols. Also revolutionary flags, maps of Crete, objects from the Ottomans presence on the island, from the era of Autonomy, the Russian presence in Rethymno until the union with the rest of Greece in 1913. It also includes objects from the 1st World War, the Macedonian Strugle and the Battle of Crete and the German occupation.
The kidnapping of Kreipe – Patrick Leight Fermor
Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011), British philhellene, travel-writer, scholar and soldier, was a deeply-cultivated man with an adventurous spirit, great courage and immense generosity of soul.
Fluent in Modern Greek, he was appointed as liaison officer to the Greek Army, in Albania. After the collapse of the Greek front, he was dispatched to Crete. There, disguised as a shepherd and with the code-name Michalis or Philedem, he fought in the mountains, together with the Cretan guerrillas against the German conqueror.
In April 1944 he led the operation to kidnap the German Military Commander of Crete, General Heinrich Kreipe. With a band of Cretans and Britons, among them Stanley ‘Billy’ Moss, they abducted Kreipe from Herakleion, together with his auto- mobile, which they abandoned on a beach near Rethymnon. They then continued on foot up to Anogeia and from there, after an eventful and dangerous course, arrived at Rodakino, from where the German general was taken by sea to Cairo.
Fermour removed from the car, an Opel, the little metal flags-emblems of the German Commander, which in accordance with Fermour’s wish, are now held by the Historical and Folk Art Museum of Rethymnon.
