Travel Guide Asi Gonia

The difficulty of access to this mountain village (in a sort of cul-de-sac) located 7 km west of Argyropoulis made it a center of resistance to the Turkish occupiers: the rebels, Haïnides, had their headquarters there with printing equipment in a cave located southwest of the village (at a place called Sikia). It is known in Crete as Guerilla Village. It is a sheep-breeding area (almost everyone is a shepherd) and every April 23 (St. George's Day), the shepherds come down to the village church with their cattle, which the priest sprinkles with holy water so that the meat is of good quality for the coming year. The shepherds then milk the sheep and boil the milk which they offer to the audience. It is also the birthplace of Giorgos Psykoundakis who wrote a superb book(The Cretan Runner published in 1955) about the resistance to the Germans during the Second World War and about those Cretan runners who valiantly ran very long distances to bring information to the British.