Knossos, Phaistos, Gortys

So the first day in Crete, we got into Heraklio in the morning after an all-night plane ride, then immediately went to Knossos. Knossos is an ancient Minoan palace rumored to be the inspiration for the Greek "labyrinth" myth involving King Minos and the Minotaur, supposedly because the palace itself is extremely complex in design. It's a bit hard to see the complexity still because a lot of the palace is off limits to tourists, but what I did see was stunning.

The next day we were in Phaistos and Gortys, two other important historical sites. Phaistos is another Minoan palace, while Gortys has ruins from the Dorian and Roman periods. Seeing all of those sites close together like this was actually really interesting, because all three were presented in very different ways.

Knossos was first excavated by the archaeologist Arthur Evans in the early 1900s. He built a lot of reproductions on site that archaeologists today see as a bit controversial. As much as I loved the site, I did find myself wondering about whether interesting things I was seeing were "genuine" or rebuilt--I have those feelings no matter how carefully reproductions have been based on archaeological evidence. But still, a large percentage of what you can see at Knossos is original:




This is the oldest known paved road in Europe, older than Roman roads by thousands of years:



Phaistos is another important Minoan site. There were no reproductions there--all the structures were original. What was really cool was that the site was constructed in stages--the Old Palace part, dating from about 2,000 BC, was mostly destroyed a few times before the major reconstruction of 1600 BC--but the old palace facade was excavated along with the new, so you're really looking back in time and seeing multiple layers of history here.







Gortys was neat in a different way. There was a large excavated part that had a gorgeous church and the amazing Laws of Gortys, the earliest law code in Greece which is still in situ at the site. But across the street from that, there's a huge area that's barely been excavated and not restored at all. We weren't allowed to go inside, though we could look at the excavated part from a distance. The small part that was excavated was surrounded by fields full of bricks and rocks from Roman walls. The most interesting thing to me was thinking of how much of the old city was still under our feet.



This is what most of the unexcavated part looked like, although there were still a few standing walls:





At Gortys there was an olive tree that had grown around a broken Roman column and was at least a few thousand years old. The plaque next to it said that it was possible someone had put the column there and the tree had grown around it, or that it had fallen against the tree during the earthquake that supposedly destroyed the town.



I think this is what I always look for when I'm in an old, haunted place like this. I look for signs of the actual people--not the walls, not the statues, not the columns, but the people who were there and what happened to them. The column in the tree is something that evokes a story--a mysterious story, but something real. It's more than I felt at Phaistos (though I walked around looking for it all day) and definitely more than I felt at Knossos, where sometimes I wasn't sure whether I was looking at something real or a reproduction. I always want to feel like the first person to find a place after the people who lived there left. I want to root around in the bones and the ash. Like an archaeologist, I want to bring them all back.