The palace of Knossos

The story

A hill near Heraklion

About five kilometres from the centre of Heraklion, the largest city on Crete, there is a low hill called Kephala. Beneath the soil of that hill the palace of Knossos lay hidden for almost three thousand years. The people of the area knew there were ancient ruins down there. In 1878 and 1879 a Cretan merchant, Minos Kalokairinos, carried out the first digs and brought some rooms with big jars to light. But the great exploration began in March 1900, when the English archaeologist Arthur Evans, having bought part of the land, set a team of workmen to work. In a few weeks walls, staircases, frescoes and clay tablets appeared.

What it was like

The palace covered about 20,000 square metres. It did not look like a castle: it was a set of buildings leaning against one another, built on different levels, around a large central courtyard. The courtyard was used for ceremonies and festivals. Wide staircases, corridors, rooms joined by double doors and light wells that brought sunshine into the innermost rooms made up a complicated whole, in which a visitor could easily get lost.

In the west wing there were long, narrow storerooms, with rows of enormous terracotta jars, the pithoi, where oil, grain and wine were kept. They were the wealth of the island: farmers brought their harvests to the palace, and the palace recorded them and handed them out. Traces also remain of a system for bringing water in and carrying waste away: channels and pipes that were well thought out for the Bronze Age.

The painted walls

The rooms were decorated with frescoes: paintings made on plaster that was still fresh. Among the most famous are the bull-leaping fresco, the procession, the cup-bearer and the dolphins. They show elegant young people, court life, animals and the sea. One fact should be stated honestly: of many frescoes only fragments survive, and the images we see in books and on this site are partly reconstructed by modern artists, who filled in the missing parts.

The throne room

One of the most celebrated rooms is the one known as the “throne room”. It contains a gypsum seat with a tall, wavy back, stone benches along the walls, a small basin sunk into the floor and frescoes of two griffins, creatures with a lion's body and a bird's head. Evans called it the “throne room of King Minos”. Today scholars disagree about its purpose: it may have been a place for religious ceremonies, with a priestess in place of a king.

Two palaces and an earthquake

The digs show that people were already living on that spot around 7000 BC. The first palace was built around 1900 BC. Around 1700 BC it was destroyed, probably by an earthquake or a series of tremors, and rebuilt larger and more beautiful: the “second palace”, in use until about 1450 BC. Then came the Mycenaeans, a Greek people, who settled at Knossos and went on using the palace for a long time. This is why thousands of tablets in Linear B have been found among the remains: they are the accounts of the new masters. A major destruction of the palace is conventionally dated to around 1350 BC, but scholars debate when it really happened.

The labyrinth

The Greeks, many centuries later, told a story: on Crete reigned Minos, who had Daedalus build a labyrinth in which to shut up the Minotaur, a monster half man and half bull. Every year the Athenians had to send young people to be fed to the monster, until the hero Theseus, helped by Ariadne, killed it and found his way out by following a thread. It is a myth, not a historical fact. But it is likely that the memory of an enormous palace made up of corridors and rooms, which had vanished centuries before, gave shape to the tale. The word “labyrinth” too perhaps comes from a term linked to the double axe, a symbol found everywhere at Knossos: this explanation, however, is only a hypothesis.

Criticism of Evans

Evans did not just dig: he rebuilt. He had columns put back up, floors propped up and walls repainted, using reinforced concrete and the help of artists. The result is a palace that gives a vivid idea of what it was like, but part of what you see today is modern invention. Many archaeologists criticise this method; others defend it because it saved the remains from ruin. When you visit Knossos, then, it is a good idea to ask yourself: is this wall ancient, or was it rebuilt in the twentieth century?