The land where the house of the Venizelos family is built in the homonymous square of Chalepa was bought by Kyriakos Venizelos in 1876. A letter from Lefteris Venizelos to his father on 13 January 1879 suggests that the construction of the house was finished in about 1880 and it accommodated the deceased owner in its large hall in 1883.
The morphology of Venizelos’ house, in the type of villa with the western roof and other construction details, is also found in other houses of Chalepa that are located nearby and were built a little earlier, namely the houses of the engineer Leonidas Lygounis, a close friend of Kyriakos Venizelos. The two-storey house had the utility rooms on the ground floor, the bedrooms and the large reception room on the first floor. A garden, planted with various trees, vine, olive trees and a small house, surrounds the building, which is protected by a wooden fence. After the death of Kyriakos Venizelos, the house housed his son Eleftherios and his family and the latter’s wife, Maria, was found dead there on 11 November 1894.
After Venizelos’ meteoric rise to political prominence in Crete and Greece and his departure for Athens, the house was rented to various persons (Russian officers, Loubansky, Plumidakis, office of Kyriakos K. Mitsotakis) until 1927. Eleftherios Venizelos then went down to Crete to work personally on the radical renovation of his father’s house and to welcome Elena Venizelos, his second wife. That’s why at first he stayed at the house of his nephew Kyriakos K. Mitsotakis, the famous Galaria. When the small garden house was repaired, he moved into it to supervise the renovation and repair work himself, with the help of the engineer Stavridis and his best man Konstantino Ligidaki. The present form of the house is after the modifications made by Eleftherios Venizelos, moving the reception rooms to the ground floor and leaving the bedrooms on the first floor.
Today it houses the National Foundation for Research and Studies “Eleftherios Venizelos”.
