Digging up the Past

On Friday night, our last night in Chania, we ordered an appetizer assortment for our dinner and found we couldn't eat all of it. (I did devour every last bit of that tasty octopus, however). Instead, we packed it up and put it in the refrigerator for lunch on our Saturday morning bus trip to Heraklion.

The  trip back across Crete was uneventful, but a little tiring. Coming west, we'd taken express buses; on the return trip we took the regular bus that stopped at every little village. We left at 10:00 AM and finally pulled into Heraklion's Bus Station A by 1:00 PM, a full seven days since we had left.

This time we were a little more confident. Our hotel was just a few blocks away, right on the beach. It is a two-star hotel, but the room and view were both great and I don't think either of us miss the amenities you'd find in a fancier place.

We're staying only two nights in Heraklion (it's really not as charming as either Reythemno or Chania), which means we really only have one full day to see the sights, plus whatever we can fit into Saturday afternoon. Instead of a nap, we decided to visit the Archaeological Museum as soon as we unpacked and had a bite to eat. (We put the appetizers from the night before into the fridge in our new room. Maybe tonight.)

On the way to the museum, we found the church of Agios Titos (St. Titus). Titus was one of Paul's converts and one of Paul's letters in the New Testament was written to him, giving him advice for the new church in Crete. Along the sides of the church are paintings done in the Byzantine style showing the store of Paul and Titus in Crete.

Originally, we had intended to visit the St. Titus Basilica in Gortyna, which was the Roman capitol of Crete and North Africa (called Cyrenacia). At the time of Titus, this town would have had about 100,000 people. Today, however, it is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and we didn't have the extra day to make the trip. According to tradition, Titus died in Heraklion, and today his remains, consisting only of his skull, are venerated at Agios Titos. (They were returned from Venice in 1966.)

We got to the museum around 3:00 PM and got our tickets for both the museum and the Knossos Palace archaeological site which we'll visit on Sunday. We've been pretty lucky getting a senior discount, but not this time; the ticket-seller told us that senior discounts only applied to EU-country seniors. Oh well.

The museum was great, and, air conditioned! That makes a big difference. It has an extensive Minoan collection, with items from Knossos, Phaestos, Agia Triada and Malia. We looked at a lot of pottery from between 1900 and 1500 BC. (There were stone vessels and implements that went back to 3,000 BC as well.)

I especially liked the octopus theme that kept reoccurring.

The famous frescos that are recreated at the Knossos site are on display here.

And, of course, there were a lot of bulls. Bulls everywhere.

The jewelry was also amazing. This is the famous Minoan Gold Bee found in Malia, which depicts two bees dropping honey into a comb. This is around 4,000 years old!

It reminded me of some of the beautiful jewelry made by my own metal-smithing daughter, Hosanna Rubio.

There were many funerary art objects; it seems like most of the best-preserved ancient relics are found in tombs, which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. This is the famous Sarcophagus of Agia Triada.

The museum had an extensive collection of several different styles of burial urns. Sometimes, though, they just used regular large pots, like this.

There were hordes of weapons and coins. Seeing them after all these years, you can see why gold has been so valuable. The gold items seem unchanged by the years; all of the other metals and stone objects are definitely the worse for wear-even the best of them.

Finally, there was the Phaestos Disk, a 16cm circular clay tablet inscribed with (still undeciphered) pictographic symbols. Every semester I give my students a cryptographic (code breaking) or steganographic (hiding messages in pictures) assignment. Maybe I can turn this into an assignment for next semester.

We got back to the hotel after dark, (I got lost, but we had Google Maps!) and we finally ate the appetizers that we had saved in the fridge from Friday night. They just hit the spot. A few minutes of reading and both of us fell right to sleep.

Sunday at Knossos

On Sunday we were up by 8:00 AM for the trip to the Palace of Knossos. We hopped on the local bus and got there around 10:00 AM. Fortunately, there were some high clouds, so it wasn't too hot.

In literature, Minos appears as the king of Knossos as early as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. This is (supposedly) his signet ring. In legend, he is the son of Zeus and Europa. Thucydides tells us Minos was the most ancient man known to build a navy. He reigned over Crete and the islands of the Aegean Sea three generations before the Trojan War (say 1900 BC).

He lived at Knossos for a period of nine years, where he received instruction from Zeus in the legislation which he gave to the island. He was the author of the Cretan constitution and the founder of its naval supremacy. Later, on the Athenian stage Minos is a cruel tyrant, the heartless exactor of the tribute of Athenian youths to feed to the Minotaur; in revenge for the death of his son Androgeus during a riot.

How much, if any of this, is true? Who knows? The Archaeological Museum went to great pains to point out that everything we know about the Minoan civilization is "pre-history". There are no contemporaneous written records. In fact, they may not even be the Minoans. That name was given to them by the Archaeologist Arthur Evans who both excavated and "recreated" Knossos around the turn of the century. (Kathy tells me that her social-media hashtags are convinced that they are the Minions!)

In any event, for us, Knossos wasn't as impressive as the Archaeological Museum. You really got the idea that the archaeologists, and Evans in particular, had done an excessive amount of improvisation. It's not just that the buildings are ruins; it's that the ruins are manufactured from hints of things that were found. For instance, he named the room in the lower-left corner of this picture the "Throne Room" so you would picture King Minos on the alabaster throne. Other archaeologists have cast a lot of doubt on this. All of the pillars, as well, are just modern reconstructions of what the pillars might have looked like.

I have no doubt that there was a huge palace here, but the details that are designed to take your breath away seem a little far-fetched. When I saw the few actual pieces of fresco in the Archaeological Museum that were used to re-imagine the Prince of the Lilies Fresco, reproduced here on the Knossos site, it strained my credulity just a bit. 

Other Minoan Palaces, such as Phaestos and Malia are open for viewing, but were not reconstructed, giving visitors "a glimpse into this ancient society without Evans' interpretations," according to our guidebook. This is the Dolphin Fresco from the Queen's Megaron.

However, we did see one genuine piece of archaeological discovery. Kathy dug this painted potsherd out of the ground while we were resting under a fig tree. I kept waiting for the guards to come take us away.