Knossos: the palace of Minos

Knossos is near the city of Heraklion, on the island of Crete. People lived here for a very long time, from about 7000 BC until Roman times. Around 1900 BC the Minoans built a great palace here. It was damaged more than once and built again. After about 1450 BC, Greeks from the mainland, the Mycenaeans, lived in it.

The palace has four wings, or parts, around a big open courtyard. In Greek a courtyard is an αυλή (ancient αὐλή). Around it there were rooms for the rulers, workshops, small shrines for the gods and halls for feasts. There were also many storerooms. Each one is an αποθήκη, the same word Greeks use today for a storeroom or a warehouse. Food was kept there in tall clay jars.

The most famous room is the Throne Room. A stone seat, a θρόνος, stands against the wall, with stone benches on three sides. Painted griffins lie on each side of it. A griffin, in Greek a γρύπας (ancient γρύψ), is an imaginary animal with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. Who sat on this throne? A king, a priestess, or someone playing a goddess? Archaeologists still do not agree.

The Minoans covered the walls of the palace with paintings. A wall painting is a fresco, in Greek a τοιχογραφία. The word is made of τοῖχος, “wall”, and γράφω, “I write, I draw”.

When the palace was dug up, only small broken pieces of the paintings were found. Artists working for the archaeologist Arthur Evans, such as the Swiss painter Émile Gilliéron and his son, also called Émile, put the pieces together and painted the missing parts. The famous Prince of the Lilies, a young man walking among flowers, was put together in 1905. But experts are not sure that all its pieces come from the same painting.

Other paintings show ladies in blue dresses, young people leaping over a bull, and blue dolphins. A copy of the dolphins hangs in a room that Evans called the Queen’s Megaron. Μέγαρο (ancient μέγαρον) means a great hall, and today also a grand building, such as a concert hall. Some experts think the dolphins were really on the floor of a room upstairs and fell down when the building collapsed. The real pieces of the frescoes are kept in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum.

The ancient Greeks told a famous story about Knossos. King Minos had a monster, the Minotaur, with the face of a bull and the body of a man. The clever builder Daedalus made a building with so many twisting paths that nobody could find the way out: the λαβύρινθος, the Labyrinth. Minos shut the Minotaur inside.

Athens had to send seven young men and seven young women to Crete, to be given to the Minotaur. One year the Athenian hero Theseus went with them. Minos’s daughter Ariadne helped him. She gave him a ball of thread. Theseus tied it to the door, found the Minotaur and killed it, then followed the thread back out. We can read this story in a book by Apollodorus, a writer who lived many centuries after the palace fell.

Was the palace really the Labyrinth? Many people think the story may come from the palace itself, with its dark corridors and its many rooms. A clay tablet from Knossos, written in the script called Linear B, uses the word da-pu₂-ri-to, “labyrinth”. Some scholars link the word to λάβρυς, a double axe, a sign often seen in the palace. But this link is not certain.

The site was found in 1878 by Minos Kalokairinos, a man from Heraklion. Then the British archaeologist Arthur Evans bought the land. He dug there from 1900 to 1931 and found the palace, part of the town around it and its graves.

Evans did not only dig. He also rebuilt parts of the palace with reinforced concrete, a modern building material. He put up short red columns. In Greek a column is a κίονας (ancient κίων), but in everyday speech people say κολόνα, a word that comes from Italian. He also rebuilt staircases and upper floors. These new parts help visitors imagine the palace, but they show Evans’s own ideas, and we cannot always be sure they are right.

Today Knossos is one of the most visited ancient sites in Greece. Most of it is a ruin, in Greek an ερείπιο (ancient ἐρείπιον). The Greek Ministry of Culture now only makes the old walls safe and strong. In 2025 Knossos and five other Minoan sites joined UNESCO’s World Heritage List. UNESCO notes that all of Evans’s rebuilding is well recorded, and it asks for clearer ways to show visitors what is ancient and what is new.