Knossos
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Interesting facts
- The Throne Room, built in the 15th century BC, is considered the oldest throne room in Europe, and its alabaster seat the oldest stone throne on the continent.
- On 5 April 1900, under two weeks into the dig, Evans's team found the first large cache of Linear B tablets ever discovered, in the remains of a wooden box.
- Knossos has yielded around 4,150 Linear B tablets; they were made of unbaked clay and survived only because the fire that destroyed the palace baked them hard.
- Michael Ventris announced his decipherment of Linear B on BBC radio on 1 July 1952, building heavily on the work of Alice Kober.
- Minos Kalokairinos's first dig in 1878 was halted by the Ottoman authorities after three weeks, and in 1898 his house was looted and burned, damaging his finds.
- The landowners would not sell to private individuals, so Evans bought through the Cretan Exploration Fund, starting with a quarter of the site and an option on the rest.
- The Throne Room frescoes were repainted by the Swiss father-and-son team รmile Gilliรฉron, and critics argue some well-known scenes are largely their invention.
- The paired, heraldic griffins of the Throne Room are typical of Mycenaean art rather than earlier Cretan work, a clue that the room was redecorated after the Mycenaean takeover.
- Terracotta pipes laid beneath the palace brought in water while stone channels carried rain and waste away, among the most elaborate drainage systems known from the Bronze Age.
- Evans bequeathed his Minoan collections to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which holds the finest Minoan assemblage outside Crete.
Why it is worth it
Knossos, on Kephala hill 5 km south of the centre of Heraklion, was the greatest centre of Minoan Crete and is often described as Europe's oldest city. People settled on the hill around 7000 BC, and by about 1900 BC they had built the first palace: a multi-storey complex around a central court, covering roughly 20,000 mยฒ, with storerooms, workshops, shrines and halls of state. After an earthquake around 1700 BC it was rebuilt larger and finer, and the following two and a half centuries were its golden age. From about 1450 BC Mycenaean Greeks ran the palace, keeping records in Linear B, the earliest written Greek, until a destruction by fire conventionally dated to about 1350 BC.
Later Greeks remembered the site through myth. Here King Minos ruled, Daedalus built the Labyrinth, and the Minotaur waited for Athenian youths until Theseus, helped by Ariadne's thread, killed it. The idea that the palace's warren of corridors and rooms inspired the Labyrinth story is old; the link sometimes drawn between the word labyrinth and the labrys, the double axe that appears in Minoan religious art, remains debated.
What visitors see today is as much a product of the 20th century as of the Bronze Age. A Cretan merchant, Minos Kalokairinos, first dug into the storerooms in 1878, but the palace was uncovered by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans from 1900 onwards. Evans coined the word Minoan and then rebuilt parts of the ruins in reinforced concrete, complete with painted columns and copies of frescoes. Scholars have long criticised these reconstructions for going beyond the evidence, but they make the building legible: the red columns tapering downwards in the Minoan manner, the light wells that brought air and sun into the lower floors, the long west magazines still lined with giant storage jars. The small Throne Room, with its gypsum seat, stone benches, sunken basin and painted griffins, is the most crowded spot on the site; whether a king, a priestess or a ritual ever sat there is still argued. Around the palace lie the Royal Road, the Small Palace, villas, tombs and the Roman Villa of Dionysos.
The original frescoes, among them the Bull-Leaping scene, the Dolphin fresco and the so-called Prince of the Lilies, along with the snake goddess figurines and Linear B tablets, are in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, and seeing both on the same trip makes sense of each. In 2025 Knossos became part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site covering six Minoan palatial centres, alongside Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, Zominthos and Kydonia. It is one of the most visited archaeological sites in Greece.
Getting there
Knossos lies about 5 km south of the historic centre of Heraklion, on the north coast of Crete. Heraklion International Airport Nikos Kazantzakis (HER) is about 5 km from the site.
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From the encyclopaedia
Knossos is an archaeological site and ancient urban centre in Crete, Greece. It is located within the southern periphery of Heraklion, about 5ย km (3.1ย mi) south of the city's historic centre. The site was occupied from the Neolithic period into the first millennium AD and became the largest and best-known centre of the Minoan civilisation.
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