As the Armenian massacres were unfolding across Anatolia, Crete witnessed an increase in the number of murders between its Christian majority and Greek-speaking Muslim minority populations. With vivid memories of previous episodes of large-scale violence on the island, Cretans grew fearful that the murders portended a tumultuous period. As the year 1895 wore on, these fears materialized and an inter-religious conflict engulfed the island for the next three years. The conflict in Crete has received scant scholarly attention and, accordingly, the Ottomanists have not usually treated the island as a locale central to the understanding of crucial transformations that the empire experienced during its final decades. The eventful history of the island does not warrant such disinterest. The conflict in Crete caused a war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire in 1897—a war that resulted in an Ottoman military victory but diplomatic defeat. In addition, it generated an international crisis that led to the occupation of the island by four European powers—Britain, France, Italy, and Russia—and the removal of the Ottoman troops from Crete by these states. This paper has two objectives. First, it seeks to grant Crete its due importance by showing how a local conflict on it pitted the Ottoman State against European powers in a desperate attempt to preserve its sovereignty on the strategic island. Second, the paper argues that the outbreak of violence in Crete at the time of the Armenian massacres was not a coincidence but a calculated move by the Christian Cretan insurgents aiming to end the Ottoman rule on the island. In this paper, I also discuss how the news about the Armenian massacres reached Crete and, in the process, was blended with wild rumors circulating among its inhabitants. In so doing, I demonstrate how the islanders saw the destiny of Crete intertwined with the blood-soaked Anatolia and regarded the local violence through the trans-regional lens of Armenian massacres in 1895.