An al­ter­na­tive ti­tle of our pa­per could be: “Chris­t­ian Ed­u­ca­tion in Turk­ish-oc­cu­pied Crete dur­ing the decade 1858-1868 … ac­cord­ing to the stan­dards of ed­u­ca­tion of the Greek state”.

Catholic pro­pa­ganda and the at­tempt to con­vert the Cre­tans dur­ing the pe­riod of Ot­toman re­forms dis­turbed a num­ber of el­e­ments: Mas­sic Chris­t­ian bod­ies, Chris­t­ian Cre­tans, Cre­tan Greeks, Dy­namic Greeks, the Or­tho­dox Pa­tri­ar­chate, even the Ot­toman Gov­ern­ment. The in­ter­est in ne­glected ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing in Crete was thus re­vived.

The found­ing of the Ed­u­ca­tional As­so­ci­a­tion of Cre­tan Sy­ros was an im­por­tant event (1860). Its mem­bers, in con­cert with Cre­tan ex­pa­tri­ates in Athens, con­tributed to Hel­lenism, for the im­prove­ment of the con­di­tions and the re­con­struc­tion of the tor­tu­ous ed­u­ca­tional fab­ric of Crete. It there­fore pro­ceeded to:

- send ship­ments of books, ed­u­ca­tional ma­te­r­ial and printed mat­ter to the is­land.

- ed­u­cate and train teach­ers to teach in Crete.

- ad­vo­cate to Chris­t­ian in­hab­i­tants for the es­tab­lish­ment and op­er­a­tion, in ad­di­tion to those al­ready ex­tant in cities and monas­ter­ies, of new schools in the provinces of the is­land.

Chris­t­ian ed­u­ca­tion in Turk­ish-oc­cu­pied Crete at the time was the re­spon­si­bil­ity of the Ec­u­meni­cal Pa­tri­ar­chate (headed by the Met­ro­pol­i­tan and de­pen­dent on Con­stan­tino­ple). With the mea­sures taken, how­ever, ex­ter­nal in­flu­ences be­gan to ap­pear on the is­land. The ped­a­gog­i­cal ten­den­cies that emerged had ori­en­ta­tions from Athens and in­flu­ences “… in Greece”.

Greek teach­ers were re­cruited for high-level du­ties, next to the Coun­cil of El­ders. They laid the foun­da­tions and or­ga­nized the pre­vi­ously ne­glected ed­u­ca­tion of Crete (1863). They trans­fig­ured the stan­dards, the phi­los­o­phy of ed­u­ca­tion and the prac­tices of the ed­u­ca­tional sys­tem, the struc­ture, the con­sti­tu­tion, the method­ol­ogy and the ed­u­ca­tional ma­te­r­ial of the free Greek King­dom.

They cre­ated the con­di­tions, af­ter the three-year Ris­ing of 1866, for Chris­t­ian ed­u­ca­tion to be or­ga­nized and func­tion more fully in the next pe­riod, un­der the Cre­tan State.