Heraklion

So now I'm at about the most southerly point in my whole Europe trip, the island of Crete - the largest of the Greek islands. I travelled across yesterday with one of those super-fast ferries. The trip only took two hours, which was nice. Once in the island's capital, however, Karen started giving me problems again. I got her out and switched her to pedestrian mode to find my accomodation. I had booked at a place called Manos Studios in a Nimfon street. Karen however only recognized a Nymfon in Heraklion, but it wouldn't have been the first time she recognized a place by a slightly different spelling. And the good thing was it wasn't far from the harbour. The bad thing was it was not the right spot. Not the right spot at all. In fact, it was some seedy back street without any street lights. No sign of a Manos Studios anywhere. So I just went to the nearest hotel and asked. Turns out the place I was after is actually in a town called Amoudara, about six kilometres outside Heraklion. Isn't that nice? So, not wanting to faff about with buses and whatnot at that time of night, I simply called a taxi. The trip cost ten Euro, but at least it got me there.

This is how I wish all of Knossos looked

Today went a bit better. Naturally I wanted to visit the old Minoan capital, Knossos. This time however I did have to faff about with buses, catching one back into Heraklion, and then another out to Knossos. And they were bloody packed! But it was worth it. Knossos is something very special. It was the first major civilization in Europe, starting in the whopping early 27th century BC. However, it didn't really flourish until the 20th century BC, reaching its height in the 18th to 15th. Remember the Mycenaeans I talked about a couple of posts ago? The ones I had to take a whole paragraph to explain how old they were? Well, when the Minoans were building huge palaces, the Mycenaeans were just getting their boots on. Its fair to say that the Minoan culture has always fascinated me, and so visiting this site at Knossos was obviously a must.

Reconstruction of Knossos by Evans. At least he seems
to have gotten the columns right.

One thing that became very quickly apparent at the site was my dislike for Arthur Evans, the archaeologist that excavated the site. Schliemann, if you'll remember, did a lot of the important excavations of the Mycenaean culture. You'll also remember I wasn't too fond of his speculation about Agamemnon that he tried to fob off as fact. Compared to Evans, however, he was as critical and skeptical as Richard Dawkins. And at least he didn't make any major reconstructions based on his wild speculations on the very spot he was excavating. Much of the palace of Knossos is made up of sections of rooms reconstructed out of cement, often painted to look like wood, based on loose speculation of what they might have looked like and what function they may have served. That in itself I wouldn't have a major problem with, but it would have nice if they had been away from the excavation site. Repairing walls with the original stones they were once made of based on sound knowledge of how they would have looked is one thing, but this is something else entirely. The fact is that we know very little about Minoan culture, and what we do know is mostly from sources such as Homer, a poet, in a time when there was no such thing as historians.

Phaistos Disc

Anyway, I could go on about Evans and why I hate him so (even modern archaeologists clearly disagree with him on many points, evidenced by the fact that all the signboards indicating purposes and meanings of rooms and buildings go to extreme effort to point out that it was Evan's opinion, not necessarily anyone else's), but I should really talk about what we do know about this site.
The Minoans have left no deciperable script of their own, the earliest writing that can be read being some so-called Linear B, which is what the Mycenaeans used. Apart from that we only have the so-calles "Phaistos Disc", a clay disc with a bunch of little scribbles on it. Then there's just what Homer and a few other poets wrote, and the fragments of art and frescoes that the Minoans themselves left behind.
Basically from these we can make some reasonable assumptions about their religion - one motif that occurs very often, for example, is the bear-breasted woman holding snakes. And by that I mean her tits were out, not that they were hairy like a bear. That would be weird. This chick is often interpreted as a mother goddess. Evans, of course, came up with this idea and promoted it as if it were fact. Now it's pretty much considered gospel, but I'm not so convinced. Another popular theme is depictions of "bull leaping", where a young man does a somersault over a bull's back. Probably this was either a coming of age rite, or just a general sport, maybe with religious connections.
Okay, I'd better hurry this up, because I still have a bit to cover about my day today. The site at Knossos is also home to another great evidence of how advanced the civilization was for its time, namely plumbing, with two different types being used throughout the palace complex: above ground for clean water, and channeled below ground for sewage.

Venetian harbour of Heraklion

Okay, wrapping things up. After Knossos I returned to Heraklio to have a look at the city itself. It's relatively new for a Greek settlement, being founded in the 9th century AD. Later it was taken over by the Venetians, and it's from them that the most obvious and impressive aspects of the city are from, namely the walls and the harbour. So I had a little bit of a look at them, but there's not that much to write.

Snake Goddess

Bull leaping fresco