Knossos

Knossos was a city of some thousands when most of Europe lived in villages. It was built, burned, rebuilt and lived in again for the better part of 3,000 years. What stands on the hill at Kephala is the last of at least two palaces, and the ground beneath it goes down through the Neolithic, the New Stone Age, to bare rock.

The first to dig here was a Cretan merchant, Minos Kalokairinos, and not Arthur Evans. Kalokairinos cut the first trenches in 1878 and almost at once reached the great storage rooms, the magazines. The Ottoman authorities stopped him. Evans, who had the money, bought the hill outright and began in 1900. The name Minoan, now given to the whole civilisation, was Evans’s own invention, taken from a king who may never have existed.

The engineering repays the walk. Along the west wing, the magazines still hold their pithoi, storage jars tall enough to stand a man in, sunk in rows. Light-wells bring daylight into rooms four storeys down. Beneath the east wing, drains cut and jointed to carry rain off the roofs and waste out of the building still run. In the throne room a gypsum seat stands against the wall between painted griffins. It is the oldest throne in Europe, and it is surprisingly small.

The fire that destroyed the palace baked the clay tablets inside it, which is the only reason they survive. In 1952 Michael Ventris read them and found the language was Greek, written centuries before the Greek alphabet existed. The labyrinth and the Minotaur belong to literature rather than archaeology, and the site is better for knowing it. A morning is enough, because the ruins are wide but the ground is flat. The finds themselves are in Heraklion, which is the other half of the visit.

House Notes

  1. Villa Ariadne

    A short walk from the gate stands the house Arthur Evans, the excavator of the palace, built in 1906 to his own instructions on a design by the architect Christian Doll. He gave the palace, the estate and the villa to the British School at Athens, and the Greek Archaeological Service took over the site in 1951. The villa sheltered the Greek government-in-exile during the battle for the island, the German surrender of Crete was signed inside it in 1945, and its garden became a listed natural monument in 2012.

  2. The Stratigraphical Museum

    The British School at Athens still works the valley from its Knossos Research Centre on Evans’s old estate: a hostel, a research library and the Stratigraphical Museum, which holds the material from a century of digging around the palace. The Knossos 2025 project raised more than £2.6 million, over half of it from the Packard Humanities Institute, for a 700-square-metre mezzanine of study and storage space, laboratories for ceramic and bioarchaeological analysis, and a digitised catalogue open to researchers.

  3. The Little Palace

    The Little Palace stands 230 metres north-west of the great one, the second-largest building at Knossos, some 1,500 square metres on three levels. It has pillar crypts, polythyra (walls of folding doors) and a lustral basin, a sunken room for ritual washing, whose Minoan clay plaster still holds the impressions of the fluted wooden columns that stood in it. It burned in Late Minoan II, and the serpentinite bull’s-head rhyton, a ritual pouring vessel inlaid with shell, rock crystal and jasper about the muzzle and eyes, came from here.

  4. The Theatral Area

    Outside the palace to the north-west, two L-shaped wings of wide, shallow steps meet at a square gallery where the royal family is thought to have sat. It is Neopalatial work, from the age of the later palaces, with room for an estimated 500 people and a rainwater duct running alongside the seats. From it the wide, paved Royal Road runs west through the Minoan town to the Little Palace; the area survives in good condition, and on this ground the Minoan plan reads whole.

  5. The Horns

    On the south side of the palace, by the South Propylaeum (the southern gateway), a pair of horns of consecration in porous limestone stands 2.2 metres tall and 2 metres broad. They are a restoration, and the term is Evans’s own coinage for a Minoan symbol usually read as the horns of the sacrificial bull. He set them to frame the peak of Mount Juktas, the mountain on which the Central Court is also oriented.

  6. The Caravanserai

    The Caravanserai lies south of the palace on the road that ran into the interior of the island: living rooms and bathing installations of the Middle Minoan III and Late Minoan IA periods, in use down to Subminoan times, with pithoi (large storage jars) and fruit found in the storerooms on its east side. Its main room, reconstructed by Piet de Jong, carried the Partridge Frieze, and a copy stands there now. West of it, the Spring Chamber keeps a bench for offerings and a niche for a lamp.

  7. The Temple Tomb

    The Temple Tomb lies 630 metres south of the palace on the old road inland: elaborate ashlar (squared stone) masonry, a limestone-paved court, a two-storey block above, and beneath it a pillar crypt whose two central pillars carry incised double-axe marks, later fitted with balustrades and turned into an ossuary, a store for bones. It is Neopalatial and stayed in use until the final destruction of the palace around 1380 BC. Evans found it in 1931, having first located the gold Ring of Minos nearby.

  8. Villa Dionysos

    Knossos went on being a city long after the palace. Under Rome it was Colonia Iulia Nobilis Cnossus, and 30 Roman mosaics are now known from the valley, eight of them, the largest coherent group, in the Villa Dionysos, a peristyle (colonnaded) court with rooms on three sides. Its excavator read the building as a shrine of Dionysiac cult, but the pottery and the imported wine amphorae point instead to the reception rooms of a second-century domus, a Roman town house.

  9. Skalani

    Scalarea Estate stands at Skalani, 4 kilometres from the site, on ground the Cretans called Fantaxometocho, “the haunted domain”, a name made up to keep pirates away. The Boutari family planted here in 1990: 6.6 hectares on the north face of a low hill in the Archanes zone, in Vidiano, Kotsifali, Assyrtiko, Malvasia Aromatica, Chardonnay, Syrah and Moschato Spinas. The cellar receives visitors Monday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

  10. Archanes

    South of the site at Archanes, the hill of Fourni holds one of the most important prehistoric cemeteries of the Aegean: tholos (beehive-shaped) and chamber tombs in use from about 2400 to 1200 BC, unknown until the archaeologist Sakellarakis opened the first trench in 1964, with grave goods drawn from the Cyclades, Egypt and the East. On the north slope of Mount Juktas above it stands Anemospilia, a three-chambered building brought down by earthquake and fire around 1700 BC.

Mythology

  1. Ariadne

    Ariadne is the daughter of Minos, and the myth keeps her at Knossos. In the Iliad, Daedalus makes her a dancing floor here; in Apollodorus she asks the same craftsman for the way out of the Labyrinth and gives Theseus the thread that brings him back.

  2. Epimenides

    Diogenes Laertius says Epimenides came from Knossos. After he purified Athens, Diogenes says, Epimenides refused the reward the city offered and made a treaty of friendship and alliance between Knossos and Athens.

  3. Hyperion

    The Cretan account Diodorus reports puts the Titans, Hyperion among them, in the land about Knossos. He writes that men of his own day were still shown there the foundations of a house of Rhea and a cypress grove consecrated to her from ancient times.

  4. Idomeneus

    The Iliad names Knossos first among the Cretan cities whose forces Idomeneus and Meriones led to Troy. Their forces filled 80 ships.

  5. Minos

    The Odyssey places Minos at the great city of Knossos, where he rules as a companion of Zeus. In Apollodorus, his claim to the throne of Crete begins with the bull Poseidon sends from the sea and ends with the Minotaur shut inside the Labyrinth.

  6. Pasiphaë

    Knossos put the result of Pasiphaë’s story on its coins. A silver stater struck there between 425 and 360 BC shows her son, the Minotaur, running on one side and the Labyrinth on the other; in Apollodorus, Minos shuts the child inside this winding building made by Daedalus.

  7. The Cretan Bull

    Homer names Knossos as the city of Minos, whose part in the capture changes with the ancient account followed. In Apollodorus's sacrificial version, Minos's decision to keep Poseidon's bull also begins the story that leads to the Minotaur.

  8. The Iliad

    Knossos stands first among the Cretan towns in the Catalogue of Ships. Idomeneus, famed for his spear, and Meriones lead the contingent, drawn from Crete of the hundred cities, and 80 black ships follow it.

  9. The Labyrinth

    Every ancient writer who places the Labyrinth puts it at Knossos, and Pliny, writing in the first century AD, reports that not a vestige of it was left. The earliest mention of Daedalus at Knossos, in the Iliad, is of a dancing floor he makes for Ariadne, not a maze.

  10. The Minotaur

    Every telling that names a place puts the Minotaur at Knossos. In Apollodorus, Minos shuts him in the Labyrinth there, and Theseus kills him in its last part. Plutarch reports a Cretan version with no monster at all, only a general of Minos named Taurus, who won the young Athenians as prizes at funeral games.