Knossos and the Minoans of Crete

Before classical Greece, before Mycenae, there was Crete. Around four thousand years ago a Bronze Age people on the island were building palaces, painting their walls and keeping records in a script of their own. We do not know what they called themselves. We call them the Minoans, after a king of Greek legend, because that is what the man who dug them up decided to call them.

Evans and his palace

The ruins at Knossos, on the edge of modern Heraklion, were first found in 1878 by a local man, Minos Kalokairinos. The serious excavation began in 1900, when the English archaeologist Arthur Evans, having bought the site, set his workmen to dig. Within a few years he had uncovered a sprawling complex of rooms, corridors, courtyards and storerooms, which he called the Palace of Minos, after the king who in Greek myth kept the Minotaur in a labyrinth beneath his palace. The civilisation he named Minoan.

The palace in its main form belongs to the Middle and Late Bronze Age, from about 1900 to 1450 BC, with its high point in the second half of that period. Among its rooms is a throne room with a griffin fresco, much restored.

Evans did not stop at digging. Where the old wooden columns had rotted away, he replaced them with columns of reinforced concrete. He restored rooms, rebuilt staircases and had the wall paintings restored. The result is the Knossos you see today, part ruin and part reconstruction, and it has been argued about ever since. One famous staircase grew in the rebuilding from five steps to eleven. Archaeologists now regard much of the work as a picture of what Evans imagined rather than what was there. And yet, for a visitor, the reconstructions do something that a bare ruin cannot: they let you stand in a room and see, roughly, how it might have looked.

There is a good case for seeing Knossos twice in your head as you walk round it. Once as Evans saw it, a royal palace of a sea-going people, with its painted rooms put back together and its columns standing again. And once as the archaeologists of today see it, a far older and more puzzling complex of buildings, used and rebuilt over centuries, whose purposes are still debated. The two pictures do not quite fit, and the gap between them is where most of the interest lies. It is also worth remembering the local man who found the site first, more than twenty years before Evans arrived, and who happened to be called Minos.

A script nobody can read

The Minoans wrote in a script now called Linear A, found on clay tablets and other objects across the island. It has never been deciphered. A later script, Linear B, also found at Knossos, was deciphered in the twentieth century and turned out to be an early form of Greek, written after mainland Mycenaeans had taken over the palace. Linear A, the writing of the Minoans themselves, still cannot be read.

In July 2025 Knossos and five other sites on the island, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, Zominthos and Kydonia, were inscribed together on UNESCO's World Heritage List as the Minoan Palatial Centres. It was a recognition that the Minoan world was more than a single famous palace.

Holidays that reach Knossos

Three holidays in the catalogue visit Crete, but only one of them lists Knossos.

Travelsphere's seven-night Exploring Crete – Chania & the White Mountains is a tour of the west of the island that also reaches Knossos and Heraklion. Its places include Aptera, Chania and Agia Marina, the White Mountains and Omalos, the Botanical Gardens of Crete, Gonia Monastery and Vouves.

Travelsphere's eight-night Classic Greece and Iconic Aegean Islands Cruise lists Heraklion among its places, along with Athens, Mykonos, Kusadasi, Patmos, Santorini and Oia, and Nafplion, Epidaurus and Palamidi Castle on the mainland. Heraklion is the city closest to Knossos, but the holiday does not name the palace.

Fred. Olsen's seven-night Scenic Greek Island Hopping sails from Piraeus (for Athens) in October, calling at Ermoupoli, Kos, Agios Nikolaos and Santorini. Agios Nikolaos is on Crete, but the cruise does not list Knossos or Heraklion.

If you visit Knossos, go early, before the coaches and the heat. Walk the site slowly, and decide for yourself what you think of Evans's concrete. Look at the rooms, the corridors and the storerooms, and the Minoans start to seem less like a legend and more like people.