Minotaurs, oh my!
Apr 16th, 2007 by Oana
Getting to Iraklio from Chania proved to be an easy task – there are buses at least every hour on the half hour that go through Retymno and take about 2 hours. Our goal: to see Knossos, of course! The palace is thought to have been the centre of the Minoan civilization and has benefited from an extensive, albeit controversial, restoration. It’s not just piles of rubble – instead parts of it were reconstructed according to the archaeologists‘ imagination so you get a pretty good idea of how it might have looked and functioned.
Knossos itself is about 5 km from the centre of Iraklio – we caught a city bus which dropped us off right at the gates. We were welcomed by bizarre shrill cries, which turned out to be produced by this beauty and several of his friends:
I can’t imagine how busy the site gets in the summer … even in April, it was overrun with French and Spanish and German tour groups and lots of children. We didn’t join a tour group and relied instead on the 3 pages in the Lonely Planet to get us through the site – it took us less than 2 hours to walk all of it. Knossos is thought to be the location of the Minotaur‘s labyrinth, although no evidence has been found of any such maze. However, the excavations unveiled some other cool features like flush toilets and sewers and lots of storage for grain, wine, oil and gold:
It’s difficult to imagine that actual people lived at Knossos over 3,600 years ago – not a very easily grasped number or amount of time. I’ve already recounted our dinner (mis)adventure, so I won’t repeat that story now. The next day, we left Iraklio for Santorini (where we were to hear more about the Minoans) on the fast catamaran.
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