The Cathedral of the Presentation of Theotokos (Trimertiri) is located in the middle of Chalidon Street in the Old Town of Chania. It was built in the place of the Old Venetian Temple of Our Lady, after the Orthodox Religious Ordinance Haiti Humayon of 1856.
During the Ottoman Empire, the temple was turned into a soap factory, which belonged to the commander of Crete, Mustafa Nailli Pasha, and in the position that is now the bells, there was the cauldron where the soap materials were boiling.
At the oil storehouse, the icon of the Virgin Mary was kept and, with the consent of Turku Pasha, the Chief of Chania. The legend of the Metropolis of Chania says that in the middle of the 19th century that Tsarkakis worked in the soap factory, in which the Virgin appeared in vision and asked to leave because she did not want her house to be a sapwood. The craftsman took the picture and left. A little later the Pasha’s child fell into the well, near to the church, and Pasha asked for the help of the Virgin Mary in exchange for the church to be restored to the Christians. The child was doing well, Pasha kept his word and started building of the new temple.
The construction of the Metropolis of Chania was completed in 1860 in the form of the three-aisled basilica with the elevated middle aisle. From the three aisles, she took her name as Trimartiri. The center where the Presentation of the Virgin Mary is celebrated, the right, where the Three Great Hierarchs Fathers and Protectors of Greek Letters are honored, and the left where Saint Nicholas is honored to replenish the Temple of Splantzia, which the Turks then converted to Mosque.
The Metropolis of Chania is celebrated on 21 November, in the Presentation of the Virgin Mary, the patron saint of Chania.
