Knossos
Overview
Knossos was a city of some thousands when most of Europe was villages, and it was built, burned, rebuilt and inhabited again for the better part of three thousand 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 to bare rock.
It was not Arthur Evans who found it. A Cretan merchant named Minos Kalokairinos cut the first trenches in 1878 and came down almost at once on the great storage magazines; the Ottoman authorities stopped him, and Evans — who had the money — bought the hill outright and began in 1900. Minoan, the name now given to the whole civilisation, was Evans's own coinage, taken from a king who may never have existed.
What repays the walk is the engineering. The magazines still hold their pithoi, jars tall enough to stand a man in, sunk in rows along the west wing. Light-wells drop daylight into rooms four storeys down. The drains beneath the east wing are cut and jointed to carry rain off the roofs and waste out of the building, and they still run. In the throne room a gypsum seat stands against the wall between painted griffins, the oldest throne in Europe and small enough to be surprising.
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 are literature rather than archaeology, and the site is better for knowing it. A morning is enough — the ruins are wide but the ground is flat — and the finds themselves are in Heraklion, which is the other half of the visit.
House Notes
Villa Ariadne
A short walk from the gate stands the house Arthur Evans raised 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; the Greek Archaeological Service took over the site in 1951. The villa sheltered the Greek government-in-exile during the battle for the island, and the German surrender of Crete was signed inside it in 1945. Its garden was declared a listed natural monument in 2012.
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 excavated material of 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.
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 across three levels, with pillar crypts, polythyra, and a lustral basin whose Minoan clay plaster still holds the impressions of the fluted wooden columns that stood in it. It burned in LM II. The serpentinite bull's-head rhyton, inlaid with shell, rock crystal and jasper about the muzzle and eyes, came out of this building.
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 — Neopalatial work, capacity estimated at 500, with a rainwater duct running alongside the seats. From it the Royal Road, wide and paved, runs west through the Minoan town to the Little Palace. It survives in good condition, and it is the ground on which the Minoan plan reads whole.
The Horns
On the south side of the palace, by the South Propylaeum, a pair of horns of consecration stands 2.2 metres tall and 2 metres broad in porous limestone — a restoration, and the term itself a coinage of Evans for a Minoan symbol usually read as the horns of the sacrificial bull. He set them so they frame the peak of Mount Juktas. The Central Court is oriented on the same mountain.
The Caravanserai
South of the palace, on the road that ran to the interior of the island, the Caravanserai — residential rooms and bathing installations of the MM III / LM IA period, in use down to Subminoan times, with pithoi 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.
The Temple Tomb
The Temple Tomb lies 630 metres south of the palace on the old road inland — elaborate ashlar 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. Neopalatial, and 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.
Villa Dionysos
Knossos went on being a city long after the palace. Under Rome it was Colonia Iulia Nobilis Cnossus, and thirty Roman mosaics are now known from the valley — eight of them, the largest coherent group, in the Villa Dionysos, a peristyle court with rooms on three sides. Its excavator, Michael Gough, read the building as a shrine of Dionysiac cult; the pottery and the imported wine amphorae read it instead as the reception rooms of a second-century domus.
Skalani
Scalarea Estate sits at Skalani, 4 kilometres from the site, on ground the Cretans called Fantaxometocho — the haunted domain, a name got up to keep pirates off it. The Boutari family planted here in 1990: 6.6 hectares on the north face of a low hill in the Archanes zone, worked in Vidiano, Kotsifali, Assyrtiko, Malvasia Aromatica, Chardonnay, Syrah and Moschato Spinas. The cellar receives Monday through Saturday, 11:00 to 18:00.
Archanes
South of the site at Archanes, the hill of Fourni carries one of the most important prehistoric cemeteries of the Aegean — tholos and chamber tombs in use from about 2400 to 1200 BC, the ground unknown until Sakellarakis opened the first trench there in 1964, the 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.