The ferry from the caldera of Santorini to the island of Crete takes about two hours going due south, but the journey makes you feel like you’ve traveled farther back in time. You can spend most of the ride on the outdoor decks, and if you look past the many couples recreating the Titanic pose (not the most auspicious nautical reference), you can see jutting rocks and violently blue waters that look no different than they would have millennia ago. I suppose most unspoiled nature is like that, but there is something about a virgin Greek landscape that looks like the beginning of a Homeric TV miniseries waiting to happen and that thrilled me no end.
Ferries are the easiest and cheapest way to get around the Greek islands, since most don’t have airports and it’s really fun to travel by sea, like a mini-cruise. I had initially planned to go to Lesvos, famous first as the home of Sappho and later as the first point of entry for migrants to Greece. For various reasons this didn’t pan out and so I set my sights on Greece’s largest Island, Crete.
No one thought the Palace of Knossos was a real place until it was discovered
The island really is quite large and it takes seven hours to get from one side to the other. Crete was the birthplace and center of the Minoan civilisation, which ended about 1400 BC, and you may know of them through the legend of the Minotaur who roamed the darkened labyrinth in the Palace of Knossos. At various stages after the Minoans, the territory was ruled by the Myceneans, the Romans, the Persians, the Venetians, the Ottomans, the Turks and the Greeks. Having just been to Venice, I was curious to see how these many influences - some of them echoed in our own culture back home - would have transferred here. We were dropped off in the city of Heraklion, home to the main port and named, you might have surmised, after Herakles. The modern part of Heraklion is a town like any other, with streetlights and roads and highways. I had decided stay nearer to Heraklion than to the port village of Chaniya, which was way on the other side of the Island, mainly because it was closer to the airport. For an island as big as Crete, it is wise to pick a portion of it to explore well rather than crisscross around in a bus all day, Chinese-tourist style, to take snapshots of everything. It is simply too big.
Figurine of a Minoan snake deity
The hotel was about half an hour away and on a beach. It turned out to be one of those all-inclusive resorts (my only experience of such places was from the movie Dirty Dancing), but it turns out not only the food but the drinks are included too! I had underestimated how much families love all-inclusive places, and was disturbed to find clowns dancing around the pools to keep the many, many kids occupied while mummy and daddy got sloshed at the pool bar. Luckily there was more than one pool and in any case, I spent my time planning excursions.
My first one was to the old city of Herakion, which is the capital of Crete and houses its oldest buildings. In what is a common theme in Greek island life, earthquakes keep destroying the buildings, so that everything is built of fragments of everything else. (Even the Palace of Knossos was rebuilt three times because it kept getting knocked over.) While sipping grappa in the shade of one of its many cafes you make out different Venetian arches, Roman basins and Ottoman minarets that dot the older city squares. I saw the main archeological museum, which has some of the most exquisite Minoan art in the world, as well as really large architectural models of what the Palace of Knossos looked like at its epoch.
The Palace, or the foundations of it that remain, is absolutely incredible. The legend comes from Homer’s Iliad, from where we also get the tales of the city of Atlantis and Helen of Troy. Homer tells us that King Milos kept his son - who was half bull, half man - locked up in a massive and inescapable labyrinth deep below his sumptuous palace. The hero Thesius arrived and was due to fight the minotaur. The king’s daughter was in love with the hero and gave him a ball of string so he wouldn’t get lost in the maze and perish like the many before him. Theseus slew the Minotaur, escaped the maze and ran off with the princess. (I also recommend you read the Iliad, since the preceding summary of it reads like a TV Guide synopsis of ‘War and Peace.’)
The Palace of Knossos, birthplace of the Minotaur legend and so much more
It’s important to remember that (like the city of Troy) no one thought that this was a real place until it was discovered. For years it languished under a mound of dirt, forgotten to space and time until it was excavated in the early 20th century when a farmer’s plough accidentally dug up some amphorae, which had painted on them the symbol of the labyrinth, and excited quite a few people.
The ruins have been excavated quite thoroughly now, and bits of them have been reconstructed to show the visitors what the palace might have looked like as glorious buildings. The Minoans had fantastic murals and frescoes, some of which were found perfectly preserved, and the archeologists have reproduced them whenever possible (the originals are in the museum, which is amazing when you think that that pigment is over 3000 years old). The center of the massive complex is a throne room carved into stone in which they found two openings no larger than a brick on either wall and in the center, a large stone basin. The mathematics of the architecture of the palace are so exact that even now, on both equinoxes, a single beam of light passes through those openings and illuminates the water basin, a sight presumably as cool in 1400 BC as it is now. The complex also boasts the oldest stone steps in Europe and is overgrown with olive groves and cypress trees and it exceeds every expectation I had of such a mythic, storied place. It used to be called the place of knowledge, where philosophers and thinkers went to learn, and it is thought that the very word ‘knowledge’ was derived from this palace. I can go on about it for ages but I highly recommend you go, if only because there are so few times you can literally walk in the footsteps of legends.
