A Minoan disappointment (Knossos)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Knossos
Date:	24/06/09 (11 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Doesn't take long to visit, and the buses to and back are pretty regular

Disadvantages: Please see accompanying review

This has to be one of the most over-hyped, and yet in practice really rather mediocre ancient monuments I've ever visited.

Happily, you're safe from ever having to visit Knossos, which is the palace / capital city of the Minoan King Minos, unless you happen to be visiting North Crete. It's very near the Cretean capital, Heraklion (or Iraklio, if you're Greek), about a 10 to 15 minute bus ride out from the city's main bus station. One of the cheif reasons why we chose this particular destination, as opposed to one of the myriad other Mediterreanean options open to us as package holiday makers, was that Crete was the seat of the Minoan civilization, which flourished about 1000 - 2000 years BC. We were initially were very interested in seeing artifacts from this area and so it seemed that a visit to Knossos - allegedly the best Minoan site of the lot - would be a highlight of our trip.

That picture of the many-columned Parthenon, which I believe is in Athens, that at the time of writing accompanies this review heading, is nothing like what Knossos is like. Knossos looks mostly like a big pile of rubble, strewn over the surface of the ground, and under it, apart from the parts that have been - some say, 'unsympathetically' - "restored" by the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. This 'restoration work' took place in the 1900s and was reportedly carried out by people who have no real idea of what Minoan palaces actually looked like, because nobody does, the Mionan civilization having been completely destroyed by an earthquake (/tidal wave?) predating the time of the Ancient Greeks. Hence the archaeologists involved apparently felt free to let their imaginations run riot. What the resultant reconstructions look like turns out to be a lot like something out of the long lamented BBC TV series 'Changing Rooms' - in which people in possession of quite ordinary looking suburban houses would go out for a few days and come back to find their living room, bedroom etc. transformed by a team of mostly colour-blind designers into the interior of a 16th century middle eastern brothel, or a Georgian ale-house, the Captain's deck of the 'Titanic' or the bottom of the sea etc.

The Sir Arthur Evans changing-rooms style handiwork is mostly made of concrete coloured dull ochre-red, with details picked out in black, white and gold. Sounds highly tasteful, no? A lot of people apparently find these restorations garish and quite objectionable, but to my mind, there is not nearly enough of this sort of stuff. They bring a welcome dash of colour to a whole pile what of it otherwise, well, difficult to tell what you're looking at exactly. There are information boards dotted throughout the site - this being Crete, not many of them - but the information they tell you is largely descriptive and therefore not much cop. 'This part was a road with a three storey building on one side', 'here are what we think are some storage areas' (say what you like about the Minoans, but they had a heck of a lot of areas - a suspisciously large amount of space, in fact - set aside for storage, according to those boards....which I supose would at least continue the 'Changing Rooms' theme then).

I have a problem with this. If you want people to pay to visit an ancient monument (6 Euros per person, at the time of writing) it either has to be pretty spectaclar - like, say, the Parthenon, which Knossos absolutely isn't - or if it is, like Knossos, an ancient monument that is basically stonework reduced to a pile of rubble you need to have some pretty kick-ass information available on site on it, that'll provide visitors with a real sense of life and the goings-on that took place there in bygone times. This, at Knossos, is sorely lacking. The place is hooching with tourists, many of whom are on guided tours. I listened in on a couple of these, but wasn't greatly enlightened:

"This is an area we think they used for storage, as in this alcove were found a number of storage jars"

"This area is a road that led to the main palace"

...and so on. The tourists, unanimously, look bored out of their minds; on such a tour a good guide would be able to extract at least some level of interest from far less promising source material.

All this said, it isn't specifically Knossos itself that I'm objecting to; in better hands this could be a far more impressive attraction, but to my mind the authorities who run this site have become complacent and rely upon the city's (I would say, in its current condition undeserved) reputation to bring in visitors. It was, for me, an utter disappointment.

Incidentally, it's also over-staffed with many, I would say overly officious superintendants, who blow whistles at surpised visitors who they see transgressing any of the site's many (unwritten, unpublicized) rules - the two most commonly broken of which I can deduce are (1) climbing on the ancient monuments (as if Sir Arthur Evan's restorations in concrete hadn't already knocked seven bells out of them) and (2) smoking on the site. The latter is only a rule applying to tourists; from what I saw Greek or otherwise local smokers at Knossos evidently, are openly tolerated.

Summary: In its current state of management, not much cop.