Crete III: Knossos

We packed up our junk and left the hotel for the last time before busing over to Knossos. Knossos was exciting for a few reasons, the best of which being that it is not a collection of knee-high piles of rocks. Back in the late 19th century, shortly after Schliemann excavated Troy and Mycenae and announced that he'd found the personal belongings of most of the figures of Greek mythology, a rich Englishman named Arthur Evans bought some land just outside of Heralkeion and started investigating local rumors about an archaelogical site there. This turned out to be a pretty smart idea. Schliemann found both Troy and Mycenae, which contempory scholarship said didn't exist, by going to rough area where Homer said they were and asking the locals. "Oh, that old place? It's buried under that hill over there." Anyway, like Schliemann, Evens found a huge and incredibly important site, the biggest and best palace of the people Evans later named the Minoans, after the Cretan king who also had a thing for bulls. Unfortunately, Evans wasn't an archaeologist and he had a lot of money, so when he got tired of looking at the actual ruins he paid some people to reconstruct a lot of them. On the one hand this irks a lot of archaeologists, since the reconstruction messed up some genuine ruins and is almost certainly wrong. On the other hand, it's a lot more interesting to look at and the Greek Archaeological Service actually makes money off of it. And it's also a lot more photogenic.

A building that actually looks intact. Most of it is fake.
Two stories.
Reconstructed floor next to uneven ancient floor. This alos gives you an idea of how big the site is.
Reconstructed frescos. These are copies of the reconstructions in Athens and the Herakleion museum. The nice thing about these is that you can't tell how little of those is actually preserved Minoan plaster.
Horns of Consecration. This is a textbook example of the I-don't-know-what-it-is-so-let's-just-say-it-had-cult-significance rule of archaeology. There are a few theories about what exactly they were for, but these things are used for decoration all over Knossos. That they represent bull horns is pretty certain, since the Minoans in general and the people of Knossos in particular seem to have really liked bulls. This is part of the reason why they're named after King Minos, who also gave his name to the minotaur.
Wood and paint, which are two things you normally don't see in 3500-year-old buildings.
Storage rooms. These are the other reason these guys are named after Minos. Minoan palaces were primarily warehouses and distribution centers, and they all had lots and lots of room for storage. When you look at the floorplan of these, they're organized in a very space-efficient but horribly confusing way, like a giant maze. Knossos was the biggest palace and had the most storage and the most convoluted maze. The theory is that the later Greeks who set up their own city at this site saw the ruins and some of the artwork and came up with the myth of the Cretan King Minos and the giant bull monster that he kept locked in a maze to explain where this stuff came from. When the Athenians were coming up with their own origin stories, they talked about how Theseus, unwilling to let his fellow Athenians be fed to this nasty foreign bull thing, went over to Crete and killed the minotaur, seduced Minos' daughter and freed Athens from paying tribute to Knossos or wherever.
Arther Evans' idea of what the Minoans' idea of what a griffin looks like.
The throne room. Both Minoan palaces and the Mycenaean palaces based on them liked to put the throne (whether it was for a king or a high priest is uncertain) right against the wall, facing a big hearth.
A bunch of unmarked doors. The minotaur is behind one of them.
Three stories! At real archaeological sites the best we ever get are stairs and collapsed bits of ceiling.
Minoan architecture might have been really pretty. This was based off of frescos, so it's not completely arbitrary. It also doesn't pass modern archaeologists' rigorous standards for reconstruction, though.
A big staircase. Evans' idea of Knossos was also vertically complex. They didn't just built up, but also down.
When we were being briefed on the site, Dr. Farney mentioned that Evans had a bunch of peacocks imported to help improve the English garden feel of the place. The Greeks either take care of them or just import more when the old ones die, but in any event we could hear them crowing (or squawking, or braying... I'm not sure what the appropriate term is for peafowl) off and on. At one point they seemed to just leap up from a roped-off area and charge into the courtyard in front of us to show off.
They darted off into a group of tourist to make sure that everybody stopped touring to admire their plumage.
Then they withdrew before Doug could take one home as a sourvenir.
A colorful, peacock-free room.
The famous "bull jumping" fresco. It depicts a guy doing a backflip over a bull, with a woman on either side of it. People have spent the last century arguing about what this actually represents, with the two big contenters being sports and religious ritual.
And one last photo of 100-year-old 3500-year-old ruins.
That's it for Knossos, and now it's just museum pictures and then we're done with Crete.