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A backward glanceJust outside the Knossós palace complex, excavation of this storage pit revealed, at the bottom, ruins from about 2000 B.C.E., well before the Minoans ever got around to palace-building. -
At KnossósKnossós was far from crowded during our late Sunday afternoon visit. This is how most of the Minoan sites we saw looked. Restoring much more than the bases of the walls requires a lot of speculation, and in places like the recently excavated Káto Zákros palace, reconstruction has gone no farther than that. Sir Arthur Evans, as we'll see, was willing to follow his hunches a good deal farther when he excavated Knossós a little more than a century ago. But that didn't affect the whole site; quite a bit of it looks like this. -
Ancient plumbingLike other Minoan palaces, Knossós had a system of channels and terra cotta pipes, running under floors or between walls, to carry captured rainwater to the palace cisterns. The pipes rested in stone channels that have survived better than the pipes.
Unlike the other palaces found so far, Knossós also had another system that enabled flush toilets. It was a simple affair that relied on a bucket of water for flushing. Obviously it must have terminated somewhere other than the cisterns, and it wasn't available to just anybody—the only surviving example is beneath the chamber Sir Arthur identified as the Queen's Bathroom. (The 'fixture' there, in case you're wondering, was a hole in the floor.) -
Stories and pillarsGeorge and Dorothea are looking down from the walkway toward the base of one of the multistoried parts of the palace that Evans reconstructed. The painted pillar, made from the trunk of a cypress tree, is also a reconstruction. None of the original wooden pillars survived the ages, but their shape and some idea of their colors was obtained from pictures and models that did survive. However, the Art Nouveau taste of the early 20th century probably had some influence on the way these reconstructed pillars were painted. The reason why the original pillars tapered toward the bottom rather than the top may have been practical rather than esthetic. The tree trunks were placed upside down, and I read in one place that this was done to keep them from sprouting. I have no idea whether sprouting was likely or even possible, but perhaps the builders considered a pillar with a wide top better able to bear the load placed on it from above. -
Wall and pillarThe same reconstructed pillar from a different side. You can see that structural walls (assuming that the reconstruction is accurate) were far from thin. -
Lower (but not bottom) storyI'm not sure where on the site this picture was taken, but even if the 'stairway to nowhere' wasn't in it, the thick walls would suggest that there was once another story resting on top of it. The floors have been restored with some of Sir Arthur's concrete. -
PíthoiSo many of these giant jars have been found at major Minoan sites that it's clear they were the main storage containers for the oil and grain that formed the basis of the Minoan diet. Very large quantities of both oil and grain evidently filled palace storerooms, either because the palace housed many mouths that had to be fed, or perhaps because subjects brought oil and grain there to pay their taxes. -
Another píthosWe're still in the storage area. -
More cypress columnsThese columns (reconstructed, like all the others) are near the room Evans designated the Throne Room. -
A room with a throneSir Arthur believed that the king held court here, sitting on the alabaster throne (which was indeed found in this location), but the presence of a basin possibly used for religious purification led him to argue that the king was also a priest and mainly spent his time here presiding over religious ceremonies. More recent scholars have suggested that the throne’s occupant was a priestess—asserting, among other arguments, that the seat is sculpted to fit a woman more comfortably than a man.
The walls were painted by Swiss artists that Evans employed, but the griffins, with the bodies of lions and the heads of birds of prey, were presumably based on what the archaeologists found. Some scholars suggest that the room was given its final form during the palace's last period, when the occupants were Mycenaeans—and pairs of griffins are said to have been a favorite Mycenaean motif. -
The queen's suiteAs the Rough Guide points out, it's easy enough to imagine the queen and her ladies enjoying this pleasantly decorated space, but it seems that the famous dolphin fresco was in fact found in an outside courtyard, and perhaps additional 'overinterpretations' have been built into the reconstruction. Some think the rooms are a bit small for a royal personage, and argue that the queen would have had airier quarters somewhere in the higher stories that it wasn't possible to reconstruct. True, the suite is on the lowest level, but that might have been desirable in the hottest weather. -
Bull relief muralEvans reconstructed a fragment of a portico that sheltered this fresco. The charging bull was first modeled in relief on the background and then painted, as are all frescos, while the plaster was still wet. The repainting by Evans' artists was probably guided, at least to some extent, by the relief, but some may be speculation. It seems that only a part of the fresco was recovered, since the bull is seen only from the shoulders forward.
In the foreground, tumbled stones suggest what the whole site would look like if not for Sir Arthur's willingness to trust his instincts. He probably got a lot of it wrong, but, on the good side, non-expert visitors like us have a more vivid sense of what Minoan palaces might have looked like than mere piles of stones could give us. Even if Knossós misleads us a little, one could argue that we're better off for the experience. -
Shadow on a wallIt was getting later; shadows were lengthening and the visitors remaining were few. -
Shadows on the groundWe (and a couple of other sightseers) leaned on a railing above the side of the palace where envoys used to arrive by water. The valley we were looking into (a few kilometers from the coast) is dry now, but in ancient times an arm of the sea apparently led into it, and there was a place where visitors to the palace could debark. George told us that, although not all Minoan palaces had that sort of arrangement, they were usually near the sea, but always built out of sight of it because of the danger of pirate raids. -
Theatral stepsWe left by the north gate. Not far outside it were these broad steps, suitable for the acting out of ceremonies and rituals (such as, perhaps, saying 'Hello' or 'Goodbye' to the king or the season). -
The old roadGeorge pointed out that this stone-paved road, running north from the 'theatral steps,' is about 4,000 years old. We were leaving Knossós (though not by this road, which didn't lead to the parking lot). -
The way in to GórtysGórtys (also Górtina) was an important city centuries after the Minoan period, and in the time of the Roman Empire it was the capital of the province that included Crete. The ruins we saw there were all from this period. Our excursion with George on the second day was thus out of chronological order, but the geography was compelling, as our trip from Iráklio brought us to Górtys before the Minoan sites at Phaistós and Agía Triáda. The oldest olive trees on the site were probably there when the city was abandoned in the 8th century C.E., and according to the Rough Guide one of them (which we didn't see) is believed to be 1,800 years old. -
Olive trees at GórtysHere are two more of those impressively aged trees. -
George PapadópoulousAs we were heading toward the ruins of Roman Górtys, Dorothea took this picture of our invaluable guide. -
Me and GeorgeNo comment. -
Approaching the cathedralGórtys was Crete's capital and biggest city when St. Paul came here. His companion Títos, whom Paul left here to take charge of the Christian community in Crete, became the island's first bishop (and later Crete's patron saint). This ruined basilica dates from the reign of the emperor Justinian in the late 6th century; it replaced whatever cathedrals had stood in Górtys during the previous 500 years. -
Wall and treesArchaeologists restored this ancient wall; meanwhile Nature is doing her part to keep the olives going. -
St. Títos' BasilicaThe apse is the only part of the basilica that remains. It's the part of the church where the priests celebrated the liturgy. The nave, where the congregation would have stood facing the apse, is gone, as is the narthex that would have been in back of it—an outer room separate from the nave, where those who were not baptized Christians had to go when the holiest part of the liturgy began. -
SaintsThis modern icon, hung in the basilica's apse, expresses Orthodox Christian reverence for the site and its tradition, even though the church is no longer in a condition to be used (nor would it have a congregation if it were). The icon shows St. Títos at the left and his patron St. Paul (Pávlos) at the right, with a miniature portrait of the Virgin and Child in the center. -
OdeonAn odeon, as the picture shows, is a miniature amphitheater, suitable for small-scale musical or dramatic performances, lectures, poetry readings, and so on. The Romans built this one, but like many Roman institutions it was something they had adopted from the Greeks. The name (in Greek) means ‘place for musical performances or competitions.‘ The new structure at the upper right was built to shelter a particularly interesting wall, which we'll get to soon. -
Odeon benchesEven when they were brand-new, these benches probably wouldn't have seated a modern audience very comfortably, but visually at least the benches would have had a classical grace not fully evident in their present condition. -
Roman columnsEsthetically attractive they're not, but these brick columns certify the Roman-ness of the construction: Romans used bricks, but Greeks didn't. (Bricks don't last as long as stone, but if you want to get a lot of construction done quickly—a talent the Romans were famous for—and you don't care if it lasts for millennia, it's the most practical choice. -
Legal publicationThis wall, protected by a modern structure, is made of stones inscribed—back around 450 BCE when Górtys was a Dorian Greek city-state—with the code of laws that governed it. Carving the laws on a public wall enabled any literate citizen to know exactly what they were. Fortunately for future generations, the Romans preserved a lot of the wall by incorporating the stones into one of their buildings. The law-code didn't survive in its entirety, but this reassembled portion is the longest legal text from that era that has been found anywhere in Greece. -
Ox-turning linesThe lines were carved in alternating directions: left-to-right alternating with right-to-left, so that readers could read them continuously as they walked back and forth. When the direction changes, the letters remain upright, but are turned around backwards, so that non-symmetrical letters (like E, F, S, P, and a shallow C) look right to us in the left-to-right lines, but backwards in the right-to-left lines between them. If you look for these letters you can quite easily see the effect.
Greeks called this format boustrophedón (‘ox-turning,’ by analogy with the path an ox follows in plowing a field.
Not all of the letters mentioned above represented the same sound they represent for us, but the shapes are the same. A few of the letters have come down to our time in the Roman alphabet (by way of the Etruscans) but not in the Greek. -
Dorothea at GórtysA true Hellene, my wife always feels at home in the company of an olive tree, regardless of its age.