Working on a Dream:

The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos

in Archaeological Research,
Heritage Protection and Daily Life1
Giorgos Vavouranakis, National & Kapodistrian
University of Athens

Landscape has been defined as ‘a usefully ambiguous concept’,

being both the medium and the outcome of the dynamic relation
between people and their environs.2 Human agency shapes the
landscape and imbues it with meaning. In its turn, the landscape is a
social actor, because its materiality provides people with specific
affordances for activity and it incorporates collectively held values.
Such approaches may be applied to the history of archaeological
research, so as to illuminate the ways in which past material remains
are envisioned as parts of wider landscapes, as well as the ways in which
such landscape perceptions shape further research on these remains.3
This article examines the case-study of Knossos, a prehistoric site on
the island of Crete, Greece. Knossos is best known for the ‘Palace of
Minos’, an architectural complex of the second millennium BC and one
of the main keys to understanding Minoan society. It is here argued
that archaeological research at Knossos has been the combined result
of the ways in which scholars, tourists, local people and the Greek state
have perceived the Knossian landscape and its material remains.
Consequently Knossos is a palimpsest of the scholarly, the economic,
the everyday and the heritage landscape.

The History and Archaeology of Knossos

Knossos is the ancient name of a low hill in the middle of the valley of
the Kairatos river, running south-north to Poros-Katsampas, which is

Cultural History 2.2 (2013): 213–231

DOI: 10.3366/cult.2013.0048
# Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/cult

213
 Cultural History

Fig. 1 The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos from the air in 1976. After Hood,
Sinclair and Taylor, William (1981), The Bronze Age Palace at Knossos: Plan and
Sections, BSA Supplement 13, London: The British School at Athens and Thames
and Hudson, fig. 3. Reproduced with permission of the British School at Athens.

both the prehistoric and the modern port of the city of Herakleion.
Knossos was first settled in the Neolithic (7000 BC).4 In the Middle and
Late Bronze Ages, or the first half of the second millennium BC, it
evolved into an urban centre, probably the largest in Crete. The main
feature of this town was the aforementioned ‘Palace of Minos’. It was
the economic, religious and political centre of both its settlement
and its wider region (Fig. 1). Its influence extended beyond Crete, to
the Aegean and the east Mediterranean. After the Bronze Age, Knossos
evolved into an important ancient city-state and then became a
Roman colony. Its decay started in the Middle Ages, when Herakleion
prevailed as a significant hub of Mediterranean maritime traffic.

Knossos until the Nineteenth Century

Research at Knossos started in the Renaissance classicist imagination
when scholars sought the historical reality behind the myth of the
labyrinth, home of the legendary Minotaur, the half man/half bull
beast son of King Minos.5 Several artists, inspired by Roman coins from

214
 The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos

Knossos depicting a maze, created imaginary reconstructions of the

labyrinth in the landscape.6 Although Knossos had survived as a place
name for the Roman colony in its original location, the labyrinth was
usually and wrongly identified with a cave in south-central Crete, near
the ancient city of Gortyna.
Research on King Minos himself was also an important object of
scholarship and crystallised early in the nineteenth century. Several
German classicists combined the study of ancient art with textual
sources, comparative religion and linguistics, in order to reach the
truth behind the myth and produce a historical synthesis of Crete
before Antiquity.7 They suggested that King Minos, mentioned by
Thucydides as a naval ruler of the Aegean, was a mythical figure and
signified a series of events before the Trojan War and marked by the
flourish of Knossos. This historical period was called ‘Minoan’
(‘minoisch’ in German).8
Such armchair scholarship had prepared the minds of educated
Europeans by the mid-nineteenth century, when travellers visited
the Greek lands systematically, in order to follow in the footsteps
of Pausanias and Strabo. Faced with the rather different reality of
Ottoman Greece, they employed their imagination to envision
ancient Greece. They illustrated monuments and described them in
their travel memoirs.9 This traffic included Crete and the quest for
King Minos and the Achaeans, the Dorians and the Pelasgians that
are mentioned by Homer.10 Although many travellers continued to
misplace the labyrinth, others, such as Robert Pashley and Thomas
Spratt, noted that focus should be placed on Knossos exclusively.11
This hypothesis was confirmed by Minos Kalokairinos, a Cretan
businessman and scholar, who attempted a small scale excavation
at Knossos,12 and unearthed part of the palace magazines in 1878.
He identified the architectural complex with the seat of authority of
‘King Minos I’,13 thus projecting the image of European royal houses
upon prehistoric Crete.14 His finds became immediately known, albeit
as Mycenaean,15 because, following Heinrich Schliemann, scholarship
had been envisioning a Homeric past for prehistoric Crete, despite
the work of the German classicists. Unfortunately, Kalokairinos’s
finds were lost in the nationalist turmoil of the turn of the century,
when Crete attempted to leave the Ottoman Empire and join Greece.16
Understandably, there was no public appetite for archaeology. Thus,
Photiadis Pasha, then governor of Crete, declined an excavation
application by W. Stillman, consul of the USA, in 1881.17 So also the
Ottoman owners of the Knossos site initially refused to sell their land to
prospective excavators, including Heinrich Schliemann himself, the

215
 Cultural History

Frenchman André Joubin and the British (later Sirs) John L. Myres
and Arthur Evans.18

Knossos and Sir Arthur Evans

i) Evans’s excavations at Knossos
Arthur Evans finally managed to start digging in 1900.19 His travel
diaries and writings suggest that he had endorsed a Mycenaean vision
for the prehistoric remains of Crete and had been seeing Knossos
through this prism, too.20 Moreover, he adopted an excavation
strategy suitable for Mycenaean sites. Thus, he concentrated on the
Knossos hill itself and directed David Hogarth, then Director of the
British School of Archaeology at Athens, to search for burials around
Knossos.21 This strategy is reminiscent of Mycenae, with the akropolis,
the palace in it and the tombs around it, such as the Treasury of Atreus.22
However, it soon became evident that the finds pre-dated the
Mycenaean period and belonged to a different cultural formation.
Evans turned to German classicism, which was familiar to him
through a study term in Göttingen, and brought up the term
‘Minoan’ again, albeit in a rather different manner.23 He combined
his classicist background with Orientalism24 and, mainly, Edwardian
evolutionism,25 and presented Minoan Crete as an organism that had
fruitfully borrowed cultural norms from its contemporary eastern
Mediterranean neighbours and, especially, Pharaonic Egypt. Crete was
thus seen as a pre-Hellenic but rather advanced European civilisation
and also a peace-keeping naval power in the prehistoric Aegean, ruled
by ‘Minos’, a title for priest-kings who supervised complex rituals in
the elaborate palace setting of Knossos.
Evans employed several strategies in order to explicitly promote this
vision. Instead of a final excavation report, he published a synthetic
work which,26 according to its telling subtitle, presents ‘a comparative
account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilisation’.27
In addition, he restored the architectural remains of Knossos. This
restoration started as a means to preserve the architecture from
weathering28 but resulted in a much more flamboyant end product,
with both fictive and false reconstructions, while the Art Nouveau and
Art Deco aesthetics of Evans’s architects29 overwhelmed the prehistoric
remains themselves.30 Finally, trees were planted to set the palace
landscape apart from its surrounding region.31 This act has to be seen
in relation to the fact that Evans had bought the land and also built
a house, namely ‘Villa Ariadni’. Evans probably saw the whole of
Knossos as his personal estate,32 which he essentially turned into an
English landscape garden with a Minoan theme, well embedded in the

216
 The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos

Fig. 2 View of the reconstituted ‘Hall of the Double Axes’. After Evans, The
Palace of Minos, vol. 3, p. 335, fig. 222.

wider nostalgic atmosphere of the period after the Great War.33 As a

result, the site of Knossos is more representative of Evans’s vision of it
rather than of its historical importance (Fig. 2).34

ii) Research at Knossos after Evans

The impact of Evans’s work was immense.35 It produced
and dominated Minoan research as a discrete sub-discipline of
archaeology, not only due to his frequently imposing figure,36 but
also because of the volume of his finds and interpretations. The latter
necessitated a lengthy research digestion, as excavation at the wider
area of Knossos was subsequently and mainly restricted to small test
trenches and rescue excavations. This period closed in 1980, when a
survey volume reviewed all previous fieldwork in the area of Knossos.37
This volume may at first strike the reader because it adopts a strictly
empiricist perspective according to the wider paradigm that had
prevailed in archaeology (Fig. 3). As much as this was a departure from
Evans’s interpretative affluence, it did not challenge, question or even
discuss Evans’s paradigm either and, hence, it implicitly but deeply
respected it.

217
 Cultural History

Fig. 3 Map of the 1980 Knossos survey, showing sites from the Neolithic to the
Late Minoan I period. After Hood and Smyth, Archaeological Survey, p. 7, fig. 2.
Reproduced with permission of the British School at Athens.

218
 The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos

iii) Evans’s vision and the wider public

Evans’s vision appealed to the wider public greatly and fuelled
the interest of early-twentieth-century European intellectuals and
artists. Minoan motifs found their way into literature, arts and
crafts,38 such as jewellery making, theatre scenography and painting
(e.g. the bull in Picasso’s Guernica). Minoan Crete, as a combination
of cultural sophistication, pacifism and frivolous cheerfulness undercut
by pure sexuality, matched the overall intellectual spirit of the
early twentieth century. This spirit had already been prepared by
H. Schliemann’s discoveries in Troy and Mycenae and by F. Nietzsche’s
call to the Dionysian aspect of ancient Greek culture.39 The Minotaur,
the labyrinth and Europe as a naked young woman riding a bull
became emblematic art images during the first half of the twentieth
century.40
Tourists started to flock to Knossos since the 1930s, too.41 Guide
book reconstructions of the palace show that these people further
consumed Evans’s interpretative vision of the site.42 These illustrations
present the palace at Knossos as a brand new and shiny building, in an
idyllic setting of trees and well-ordered gardens. Minoan fakes also
became a success and found their way into many museums, thus
stressing the widespread acceptance of Evans’s finds and vision of them
in a different manner. It should be noted that Evans discussed several
of them as genuine Minoan artifacts, as he seems to have been willing
to pursue the establishment of his Knossian vision at any cost.43

iv) Evans’s influence upon the Cretans

Minoan civilisation has long held a central place in Cretan identity,
too, ever since 1883, when the Educational Association of Herakleion
started collecting antiquities and housing them in the churchyard of
the cathedral of Herakleion.44 The Association wished to strengthen
the Cretan identity through archaeology and provide a historical
basis to the Cretan revolution against the Ottoman administration
and towards the union of the island with Greece.45 Thus, they declined
A. Joubin’s bid to excavate Knossos because the French archaeologist
had taken the matter to the Sublime Porte, and this act was seen as
hostile to Greek interests. They supported Evans instead, who
cunningly retained friendly relations with them. For example, he
openly condemned Muslim atrocities against Christians,46 and actively
contributed to the humanitarian aid to the victims. He also became
involved in the drafting of the local antiquities law, although he
had not been keen on the idea of the nationalisation of antiquities
at all.47

219
 Cultural History

The same scholars became archaeological officers of Crete and set

up the Archaeological Museum of Herakleion, which predominantly
exhibited Evans’s findings. The museum and Knossos became the two
cultural arks of Crete and their importance was consumed both
formally and informally for many decades after Evans. For example, a
government plan to transfer Minoan antiquities in Athens was aborted
after a series of fierce public demonstrations in Herakleion and a
museum lock out in 1979.48 Images of Minoan Crete have been
extensively used in commercial advertisement.49 One of the two main
ferry boat companies in Crete is called ‘Minoan Lines’, which tellingly
started as a publicly held company.
However, Knossos itself has also been seen as an opportunity for
economic profit due to its tourist appeal. Hence, several souvenir
shops, taverns and even night clubs were built next to the archaeological
site, thus spoiling the Minoan feeling of the landscape. Such a
direct contrast to the emblematic role of Minoan archaeology in
Cretan identity demonstrates a twin and split local understanding of
Knossos, wherein the Knossian landscape is important within collective
imagination rather than daily routine, a heterotopia, existing only outside
real life.50 Such a split conceptualisation of Knossos might have also
been promoted by the contrast between Evans’s pacifist vision of
Knossos and the incessant involvement of Greece in wars until 1950.

v) Knossos in official heritage discourse

Whichever its causes, the split public perception of Knossos constitutes
one more manifestation of the problematic relationship between
archaeological practice and the wider public in Greece. In order to
understand this relationship, it is necessary to examine the official
heritage discourse in Greece and how Knossos is related to it. The so-
called Archaeological Service, the main state curatorial mechanism,
has always demonstrated an overt emphasis on the promotion of
Classical Greece due to its pivotal role in modern Greek national
identity. This has resulted in the maintenance of a static, nineteenth-
century antiquarianist and fetishising emphasis upon monuments
themselves as objects of ancient art, rather than as sources of
knowledge about the past. This approach has alienated people from
the actual production of archaeological work and, at the same time, it
has sacralised ancient monuments.51
Knossos has a liminal place within such a frame. On the one hand,
it does not belong to Classical Greece. Furthermore, Evans’s vision
contains a strong orientalist element,52 both personal and part of a
wider anti-classicist attitude that had prevailed within the British

220
 The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos

School of Archaeology at Athens at the time.53 On the other hand,

Evans clearly saw Minoan Crete as the cultural threshold of Greece and
Europe. This view coincided with the nationalist aims of the Cretan
scholars and complied with the official heritage discourse in Greece.54
The liminal placement of Crete matched its historical context, too.
Before Crete was annexed by Greece in 1913, Eleutherios Venizelos, a
lawyer, revolutionary and politician from the island, became Prime
Minister of Greece in 1909. Venizelos evolved into the key historical
figure of the country, leading it through the Balkan Wars (1912–13),
the Great War and the unfortunate Asia Minor campaign (1920–2).
During his office Greece doubled its land and transformed into a
modern, bourgeois middle-class based state. Thus, it was easy to accept
the discrete identity of Crete and its monuments in the same way that
Venizelos had been accepted as a discrete and yet successful figure.
Such ‘ambivalent incorporation’55 has been maintained from
Evans’s time until today. It has also been facilitated by the significant
degree of autonomy that the Ephorates, the local branches of the
Archaeological Service, retained with regard to heritage policies.
Moreover, the Herakleion Ephorate has been mostly directed by
Cretans. These facts and Evans’s status and good relations promoted
the smooth co-operation between local archaeologists and the British
School at Athens in rescue excavations at Knossos until 1980,56 while
they further contributed to the idiosyncratic incorporation of Knossos
within Greek heritage.
This incorporation must have taken the importance of Knossos as self-
evident, as there was no official act to protect the site. Knossos was listed
as a place of natural beauty as late as in 1970.57 Furthermore, it was the
Ministry of Public Works and not the Archaeological Service that
delineated zones of restricted development around Knossos in 1976,58
probably under pressure by the uncontrolled and largely illegal urban
expansion of Herakleion.59 This heritage policy was in tune with the
aforementioned local split perception of Knossos. It essentially secured
the antiquities themselves and interfered with economic interests as
little as possible. Moreover, it promoted an equally split perception of
Knossos, as a natural landscape to be preserved, an archaeological
landscape taken for granted, a landscape of tourist profit to be exploited
and a landscape of contemporary development to be harnessed.

Knossos after Evans

i) From the 1980s to the millennium: the beginning of criticism
The 1980s saw the beginning of the systematic deconstruction of
Evans’s vision. The latter was considered to be full of Victorian

221
 Cultural History

misconceptions and even manipulative of the evidence.60 Fieldwork

findings challenged the ideas of pacifism and peacefulness, while
the closer examination of other sites in the Aegean refuted the
notion of ‘Minoan thalassocracy’.61 The picture of the Minoan palaces
shifted from seats of priest-kings to political, economic, ceremonial
and cosmological centres.62 The reconstitutions of Knossos were
blamed as inaccurate,63 too modernist, and, most importantly,
irreversible.64
Greek heritage policy shifted, too. The populism of the first
Greek socialist government in the 1980s resulted in severe fieldwork
restrictions to all non-Greek archaeological institutions, including the
British School of Archaeology.65 Despite a gradual relaxation of this
rule, Knossos became and has remained, both de jure and de facto, the
sole responsibility of the Archaeological Service, which adopted a
formalist attitude. For example, a fence was built around the Palace of
Minos. Since the latter had remained safe for many decades, the fence
was largely a means to formally delineate the site in as much as to
protect it. Moreover, an extensive conservation and promotion project
was implemented for the prehistoric remains, Evans’s reconstitutions
and ‘Villa Ariadni’. This project included a series of wooden ramps that
standardised the visit to the site in a rather strict manner.66
Admittedly, the ramps aimed at practically tackling the boosting
number of visitors at Knossos. Tourism in Greece had boomed
since the 1970s. By the 1990s Knossos had become the second most
popular archaeological site in Greece, with one million visitors per
year, right below the Athens Akropolis and above Delphi in official
statistics.67 However, the combination of mass tourism and formalised
routes inevitably rendered the visit to Knossos an almost ritualised
experience,68 a cultural pilgrimage to a place where new restorations
fused the prehistoric remains with Evans’s reconstitutions and,
consequently, with his interpretations.
Finally, a proposal to render Knossos an archaeological park in
1995 indicates that the place had been established as a heritage
landscape within Greek official policies.69 Unfortunately this proposal
did not materialise and Knossos remained a heterotopia in local
perception. The tourist boom raised profit prospects and illegal
development intensified. More development pressure was placed by
the establishment of part of the University of Crete immediately north
of Knossos and the extension of the Venizeleion Hospital, the main city
hospital in the same area. These developments created a new social
hub for the city of Herakleion. Both local and central archaeological
agencies attempted to protect the Knossian landscape through a series

222
 The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos

of legal regulatory acts with the least possible concessions.70 Although

these protection acts demonstrate a genuine and active official interest,
the wider picture suggests that heritage discourse continued to focus
on the balance between local interests, tourist inflow rates and a
fetishising protection of antiquities.

ii) Recent developments

The year 2000 marked the centenary of Evans’s excavations at
Knossos, appropriately celebrated with a conference that summarised
the existing archaeological knowledge on the site71 and approached
past research in a constructive manner. Nonetheless, other critical
voices have deconstructed Evans’s views further. Hence, the
underscoring of his Victorian preconceptions and their importance
in his interpretation of Knossos peaked.72 Indicative examples are
Evans’s idiosyncratic application of Darwin’s theory of evolution in
understanding Minoan Crete and his strategy in naming the various
areas of the palace at Knossos. Thus, names such as the ‘Queen’s
Megaron’ for part of the residential quarter or the ‘Piano Nobile’ for
the upper floor have been judged as prejudiced and misleading as to
the actual function of these areas.
As a whole, research on Knossos and the rest of the Minoan palaces
has become significantly diverse.73 On the one hand it has been
proposed that the palaces were seats of faction leaders, who assumingly
took turns in the exercise of political authority. It has also been
proposed to abolish the term ‘palace’ from Minoan Prehistory as
completely inaccurate and imposing and to substitute it with ‘court-
centred building.’ On the other hand and despite the final blows to
Evans’s vision, the ‘Palace of Minos’ has been firmly established as the
par excellence socio-political hub of Late Bronze Age Crete.74 This view
essentially reconstitutes Evans’s vision, albeit upon an elaborate
conceptual basis and richer data sets.
Several new field projects echo these research developments.75
An electromagnetic and excavation sounding, currently in progress,
aims at illuminating the early history of Knossos. Another geophysical
survey in progress focuses on Gypsades, a hill just to the south
of Knossos and an important suburb of the Bronze Age town. A
third project is the Knossos Urban Landscape Project (KULP).76 It
is an intensive surface survey which aims to understand the place
of the prehistoric palace in its urban setting, to evaluate the finds
of old excavations and to facilitate a better understanding of the
long-term history of Knossos from Prehistory to the Post-Byzantine
period.

223
 Cultural History

Fig. 4 Tourist group in the central court of the palace. It is possible to see
Evans’s reconstitutions, the scaffolding of the current restoration project on the
left, the ramps of the 1990s restoration project on the right and Evans’s trees at
the background.

All three projects employ techniques that developed within the

wider frame of landscape archaeology. However, KULP has to be
singled out, as it has the most explicit landscape agenda of the three. It
thus breaks away from a long-standing tradition of examining Knossos
as a series of individual monuments, rather than as a region with
distinct character. In addition, it is jointly organised by the British
School at Athens and the local Ephorate of Antiquities. Hence, it
signals a new phase of relations between the Greek official heritage
discourse and British research. Such relations seem to be heading
towards an – at least partial – integration of the ways in which Knossos
is envisioned, since KULP has also aimed to facilitate future
development in the area. This aim links the ancient landscapes of
Knossos with the modern landscape.
The latter is characterised by the accentuation of already existing
trends. For example, the ‘Evansian’ tourist gaze upon Knossos has
not changed. The numbers of annual visits at Knossos have further
increased (Fig. 4) and the shops next to the archaeological site
are thriving. Furthermore, their owners, many of whom reside in
the neighbouring villages and suburbs of Herakleion, have developed a

224
 The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos

different way of visualising Knossos. When interviewed, they stressed

their active role in substituting the frequently absent public
infrastructure for the daily care of the place. Thus, they look after
the now old and decaying trees that Evans had planted, they keep the
roads clear of litter and they look out for fire outbreaks in the summer.
They help tourists find their way, while their establishments respond to
the extensive need for rest and recreation facilities. At the same time,
these people are very proud of the archaeological site and they
sincerely think that they promote its significance to foreign visitors
and offer service to the local society and to the state. As much as
their agency runs counter to the official state heritage policies, it is
undoubtedly a different type of heritage discourse, based on daily
routines and a piecemeal and yet holistic understanding of Knossos,
both as prehistoric remains per se and as legacy of the past and an
important anchor of local identity.77
Official discourse is also following a similarly holistic trajectory.
For example, the symbolic lighting of the torch at Knossos before
the Olympic Games at Athens in 2004 underlines the continuing
importance of the Minoan myth at a national level. The appointment
of Herakleion as a host city for the Games has placed the above
symbolic act within a wider frame of social significance. However, and
at a more practical level, the Games have also prompted the further
urban growth of Herakleion through a series of large-scale
infrastructure works, resulting in more development pressure upon
the wider region, including Knossos.
The official response to this pressure has been different than in the
past. The new law for antiquities and cultural heritage defines different
types and degrees of protection for listed sites and monuments.78 It
also eases pressure upon foreign archaeological schools, as it formally
allows joint projects between them and the local archaeological
Ephorates, such as KULP mentioned above. Thus, Knossos was
finally listed as a protected archaeological site with core and buffer
heritage zones in 2011.79 Such a shift in heritage policy has also
entailed a renewed restoration and heritage promotion programme
for the whole site.80 Finally, there are news reports about a new and
detailed plan to unify all Knossos monuments into a single
archaeological park.
These developments demonstrate a renewed state interest in
Knossos. Admittedly, this interest may be judged as an accentuated
version of past formalism and a further wish to fuse both Evans’s vision
and reconstructions with the prehistoric remains. It may also be
pointed out that the balance between a care for the monuments

225
 Cultural History

themselves and local interests, such as the survival of the shops across
the road from the archaeological site is also maintained. Nonetheless,
it is impossible to deny that an integrated and inclusive vision of
Knossos as a landscape of heritage has started to emerge, wherein all
interested and related agencies may be active. More importantly, and
despite its shortcomings, this research and heritage vision is more
promising than its past versions, in the sense that it responds to the
ways in which both the specialised and the wider public, local Greek
and foreign, have been visualising Knossos.

Conclusions
It has been argued that Knossos is a landscape palimpsest of different
perceptions. It started in antiquarian imagination, which initially
affected and guided Arthur Evans to excavate the site. The findings of
the excavation provided the basis for a renewed vision of Knossos as a
Minoan utopia with priest-kings peacefully ruling the Aegean and as
the entry point of civilisation from the Orient into Europe. This vision
was elaborately constructed as it incorporated most of the intellectual
trends of its time. As a result, it cast Minoan archaeology as a new and
discrete field of disciplinary research. Evans’s interpretative framework
dominated Minoan archaeology for fifty years, despite the otherwise
prevalent empiricist paradigm of the time. In addition, his vision was
well-tuned with the nostalgic, pacifist, frivolous and sexually indulgent
intellectual and social atmosphere of the Interwar period. It had an
immense impact on the wider public and it immediately created an
influx of tourists, which has lasted until today. These tourists have seen
and still see the reconstituted prehistoric remains of Knossos as a
Minoan Disneyland.
Evans’s vision also served as an ideological background to the Cretan
nationalist aspirations to break away from the Ottoman Empire and
unite with Greece. Minoan Crete was placed within the narrative of
Greek identity, albeit as a special case, much the same way that modern
Crete has been approached by the rest of Greece. Local perceptions
of Knossos were split between pride and profit and the site became
both a cultural sanctuary and a tourist business opportunity. For many
years the Greek state attempted to simply keep a balance between
diverse scholarly and public perceptions of Knossos. As a result, the
prehistoric monuments were seen in a static and fetishising manner.
Despite its drawbacks, this attitude demonstrates that Evans’s vision
had amalgamated with the materiality of place at Knossos. The
prehistoric remains, their reconstitutions, daily life and tourist visitors
fused together in a heterogeneous and yet inextricable whole.

226
 The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos

Research critique from the 1980s and especially after the turn
of the millennium disclosed Evans’s pre- and mis-conceptions,
but it also affirmed his overall contribution both to research and
to heritage management. New research agendas coupled with the
urban development of Herakleion and triggered an integrated
understanding of Knossos as a landscape. This understanding is
demonstrated by new field projects with an explicit landscape agenda,
such as KULP and, also, by the listing of Knossos as an area of
archaeological interest and as a heritage landscape that needs
comprehensive protection and promotion.
There are two quotations which, when combined, may serve as
a concluding remark. The long history of the site of Knossos may
be described as working on an ‘archaeology of a dream’,81 to quote
Alexandre Farnoux. This dream has not been static or ideational
but dynamic and material. Its materiality, to follow Karen Barad’s
definition, is ‘always already a desiring dynamism, a reiterative
configuring, energized and energizing, enlivened and enlivening.’82
Such materiality allows the Knossian landscape to continue to be
both the medium and the outcome of perceptions and agencies that
include the academic, research and heritage, the ethnic and the
nationalist, the socio-economic and the tourist, the official and the
mundane.

Notes
1. I wish to thank F. Hobden and D. Kemp for their invitation to participate in
the ‘Envisioning Landscapes: Adaptation and Renewal’ conference and for their
warm hospitality, both academic and friendly, during the event; A. Vasilakis and
T. Whitelaw for sharing information about their Knossos Urban Landscape Project
and also on various issues concerning the archaeology of Knossos and related
heritage policies; and G. Manginis for his critical reading of the draft. However,
I am exclusively responsible for any shortcomings of the article.
2. Gosden, Chris and Head, Lesley (1994), ‘Landscape – A Usefully Ambiguous
Concept’, Archaeology in Oceania, 29:3, pp. 113–16.
3. For example, it has been argued that Bronze Age burial places in Crete
had been imbued with meaning and hence were able to act as landmarks that
reminded people of their connections to the land and guided their agency in the
process of the passage from kin-based communities to proto-state palatial societies:
Vavouranakis, Giorgos (2007), Funerary Landscapes East of Lasithi, Crete, in the Bronze
Age. British Archaeological Reports International Series 1606, Oxford: Archaeopress.
4. For a recent review see Whitelaw, Todd, Bredaki, Maria and Vasilakis, Adonis
(2006–7), ‘The Knossos Urban Landscape Project: Investigating the Long-term
Dynamics of an Urban Landscape’, Archaeology International, 10, pp. 28–31.
5. Farnoux, Alexandre (1993), Cnossos: l’archéologie d’un rêve, Paris: Gallimard,
pp. 12–21. Kopaka, Katerina (2004), ‘H Knwso
& prin ton Kalokairino
: m
ia

227
 Cultural History

lhsmonhm
enh mhtro
polh twn phg w
n;’ in G. Cadogan, A. Vasilakis and E. Hatzaki
(eds), Knossos: Palace, City, State, British School at Athens Studies 12, London: British
School at Athens, pp. 497–511.
6. Karadimas, Nektarios (2009), Prolegomena to Aegean Archaeology from the
Renaissance to 1875, PhD Thesis, University of Bristol, pp. 63–8.
7. Ibid. pp. 32–45.
8. Karadimas, Nektarios and Momigliano, Nicoletta (2004), ‘On the Term “Minoan”
before Evans’s Work in Crete (1894)’, Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici, 46: 2,
pp. 243–58; Zw
h& , Antw
nh& (1996), Knws o
& , t o ek s t at ik o
o
rama. S hmeiwt ik h

k ai y uc ol og
ia mia & arcaiol og ik h&
p erip
et eia & , Hra
kleio: Panepisthmiak
e&
Ekdo
sei& Krh
th& , pp. 38–9, 259–60.
9. Tsigakou, Fani-Maria (1981), The Rediscovery of Greece: Travellers and Painters of the
Romantic Era, London: Thames and Hudson.
10. Farnoux, Cnossos, pp. 28–30.
11. Karadimas, Prolegomena, pp. 240–6.
12. Ko
paka, Kater
ina (1995), ‘O M
inw& Kalokairino
& kai oi prw
te& anaskaj
e&
sthn Knwso
’, Pep rag m
ena t ou Z0 Dieqn ou
& Krht ol og ik ou
S un ed r
iou,
P
equmno: Istorikh
kai Laografik h
Etaire
ia Pequ
mnou, pp. 501–11.
13. Kalokairino
& , M
inw& (1990), ‘M
inwo& Kalokairinou
. Anaskaj
e& sthn Knwso
’,
K. Ko
paka (epim.), Pal
imy hs t on, 9–10, pp. 5–69.
14. Cadogan, Gerald (2004), ‘“The Minoan distance:” the impact of Knossos upon the
twentieth century’, in G. Cadogan, A. Vasilakis and E. Hatzaki (eds), Knossos: Palace,
City, State, p. 544.
15. Kopaka, Katerina (1992), ‘Nouvelle évidence sur la fouille Kalokairinos à Knossos’,
in J. P. Olivier (ed.), Mykenaı̈ka, Supplément au Bulletin de Correspondence Héllenique 25,
Athènes: École Française d’ Athènes, pp. 381–5.
16. Ko
paka, ‘O M
inw& Kalokairino
& ’.
17. Farnoux, Cnossos, pp. 30–1.
18. Brown, Ann (2000), ‘Evans in Crete before 1900’, in D. Huxley (ed.), Cretan Quests:
British Explorers, Excavators and Historians, London: The British School at Athens,
pp. 10–1.
19. For a brief but concise account of the history of Evans’s work at Knossos see
Cadogan, Gerald (2000), ‘The Pioneers: 1900–14’, in Huxley (ed.), Cretan Quests,
pp. 15–24.
20. For his early travels to Crete see, Brown, Ann (ed.) (2001), Arthur Evans’s Travels in
Crete, 1894–9, British Archaeological Reports International Series 1000, Oxford:
Archaeopress.
21. Cadogan, ‘The Pioneers’, pp. 16–7. Hogarth, David (1899–1900), ‘Knossos II:
Early Town and Cemeteries’, Annual of the British School at Athens, 6, p. 70.
22. The same twin strategy was adopted for the Mycenaean ‘Palace of Nestor’ and its
related tholos tombs at Ano Englianos, Pylos. See Kourouniotis, Konstantinos and
Blegen, Carl (1939), ‘Excavations at Pylos, 1939’, American Journal of Archaeology, 43,
pp. 557–76.
23. Evans, Joan (1943), Time and Chance: The Story of Arthur Evans and his Forebears,
London: Longman and Green, p. 178.
24. Zw
h& , Knws o
& , pp. 31–40.
25. C. Darwin was also a family friend, while John Evans, Arthur’s father, was an early
follower of the evolutionist paradigm in archaeology; McEnroe, John (1995),
‘Sir Arthur Evans and Edwardian Archaeology’, Classical Bulletin, 71, pp. 3–18.

228
 The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos

26. Evans, Arthur (1921–36), The Palace of Minos, 4 volumes, London: MacMillan.
27. For a critical view see Hamilakis, Yannis (2002), ‘What Future for the “Minoan”
Past?’ in Y. Hamilakis (ed.), Labyrinth Revisited: Rethinking ‘Minoan’ Archaeology,
Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 2–28.
28. Evans, Arthur (1928), ‘The Palace of Knossos and its Dependencies in the Light of
Recent Discoveries and Reconstitutions’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British
Architects, 36:3, pp. 91–102.
29. Palyvou, Clairy (2003), ‘Architecture and Archaeology: The Minoan Palaces in the
Twenty-First Century’, in J. K. Cosmopoulos and R. M. Loventhal (eds), Theory and
Practice in Mediterranean archaeology: Old World and New World Perspectives, Cotsen
Advanced Seminars 1, Los Angeles: The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University
of California Los Angeles, pp. 205–33.
30. Papadopoulos, John K. (1997), ‘Knossos’, in M. de la Torre (ed.), The Conservation of
Archaeological Sites in the Mediterranean Region, Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation
Institute, pp. 93–125.
31. Papadopoulos, ‘Knossos’, p. 107.
32. Panagiotaki, Marina (2004), ‘Knossos and Evans: Buying Kephala’, in
Cadogan, Vasilakis and Hatzaki (eds), Knossos: Palace, City, State, pp. 513–31,
fig. 48.7.
33. Hitchcock, Louise and Koudounaris, Paul (2002), ‘Virtual Discourse: Arthur Evans
and the Reconstructions of the Minoan Palace at Knossos’, in Hamilakis (ed.),
Labyrinth Revisited, pp. 40–58.
34. Ibid.
35. Farnoux, Cnossos, pp. 95–111.
36. Horwitz, Sylvia L. (1981), The Find of a Lifetime: Sir Arthur Evans and the Discovery of
Knossos, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, pp. 218–19.
37. Hood, Sinclair and Smyth, David (1981), Archaeological Survey of the Knossos Area, BSA
Supplementary Volume 14, London: The British School at Athens and Thames and
Hudson.
38. Farnoux, Alexandre (2003), ‘Minw
ite& kai Mukhna
ioi ston 20o aiw
na’,
Arcaiol og
ia Kai T
ecn e& 86, pp. 36–41.
39. Nietzsche, Friedrich [1886] (2008), The Birth of Tragedy, transl. D. Smith, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
40. Ziolkowski, Theodore (2008), Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in Twentieth-
Century Literature and Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
41. Elliadi, Michael (1933), Crete, Past and Present, London: Heath Cranton, p. 43.
42. Klynne, Allan (1998), ‘Reconstructions of Knossos: Artists’ Impressions,
Archaeological Evidence and Wishful Thinking’, Journal of Mediterranean
Archaeology, 11:2, pp. 206–29.
43. Lapatin, Kenneth (2006), ‘Forging the Minoan Past’, in Y. Hamilakis and
N. Momigliano (eds), Archaeology and European Modernity: Producing and Consuming
the ‘Minoans’, Creta Antica 7, Padova: Aldo Ausilio/Bottega d’Erasmo, pp. 89–105.
44. Dimopoulou-Rethemiotaki, Nota (2005), The Archaeological Museum of Herakleion,
Athens: The John S. Latsis Foundation, pp. 15–16.
45. Carabott, Philip (2006), ‘A Country in a “State of Destitution” Labouring under an
“Unfortunate Regime”: Crete at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1898–1906)’,
in Hamilakis and Momigliano (eds), Archaeology and European Modernity, pp. 39–54.
46. Evans, Arthur [1898] (1998), ‘Gra
mmata apo
thn Krh
th’, in A. Basila
k h&
(epim.), Krht ol og ik a
Gr a

mmat a 14, pp. 39–74.

229
 Cultural History

47. The Cretan antiquities law was shaped so as to suit A. Evans, as it implicitly
discouraged all his rivals for Knossos: Carabott, ‘A Country in a “state of
destitution”’, pp. 47–8.
48. Hamilakis, Yannis (2006), ‘The Colonial, the National, and the Local: Legacies of
the “Minoan” past’, in Hamilakis and Momigliano (eds), Archaeology and European
Modernity, pp. 145–6.
49. Solomon, Esther (2006), ‘Knossos: Social Uses of a Monumental Landscape’,
in Hamilakis and Momigliano (eds), Archaeology and European Modernity,
pp. 163–82.
50. Ibid.
51. See papers in Stroulia, Anna and Sutton, Susan (eds) (2010), Archaeology in Situ:
Sites, Archaeology and Communities in Greece, Plymouth: Lexington.
52. Several German and British scholars reacted to the idea that the roots of Greece
and of the modern West lay in a pre-Hellenic cultural formation: Ziolkowski, Minos
and the Moderns, p. 13.
53. Cadogan, Gerald (2009), ‘Ypa
rcei m
ia “agglikh
arcaiologik h
scolh
” sthn

ereuna gia to prw
imo Aiga
io;’ in K. Ko
paka (epim.), H aig aiak h
p r oı̈s t orik h


er euna s t i& arc
e& t ou 21ou aiwna,
Hra
kleio: Panepisthmiak
e& Ekd o
sei&
Krh
th& , pp. 1–12.
54. Xanqoud
idh& , St. (1904), ‘O Krhtik o
& politismo
& ’, Aqhn a,

16, pp. 297–428.
55. Hamilakis, ‘The Colonial, the National and the Local’, pp. 156–60.
56. Catling, Hector (2000), ‘The British School at Knossos’, in D. Huxley (ed.), Cretan
Quests: British Explorers, Excavators and Historians, London: British School at Athens,
pp. 203–8.
57. Government Gazzette No. 666/B/23-9-1970.
58. Government Gazzette No. 373/D/10-11-1976.
59. Zacara
kh& , Giw
rgh& , Kalligianna
kh& , Mu
rwna& , Moutsopou
lou, Eu
h (2005),
‘Auqa
ireta, “taktopoih
sei& ” kai pl
egmata politikooikonomikw
n sc
esewn sto
Hra
kleio Krh
th& ’, in E. Kouj
elh (epim.), Auqa
ir et a. . . To
t e, t wra
k ai w &
p o
t e; Arcit
ek t on e& 54B, pp. 68–9.
60. Bintliff, John (1984), ‘Structuralism and Myth in Minoan Studies’, Antiquity, 58,
pp. 33–8; Zw
h& , Knws o
& .
61. Hägg, Robin and Marinatos, Nanno (eds) (1984), The Minoan Thalassocracy: Myth
and Reality, Acta Instituti Regnis Sueciae, Series in 4o, vol. 32, Stockholm.
62. Hägg, Robin and Marinatos, Nanno (eds) (1987), The Function of the Minoan Palaces,
Acta Instituti Regnis Sueciae, Series in 4o, vol. 35, Stockholm.
63. Koehl, Robert (1986), ‘A Marinescape Floor from the Palace at Knossos’, American
Journal of Archaeology, 90, pp. 407–17.
64. Papadopoulos, ‘Knossos’, pp. 115–16.
65. Catling, ‘The British School at Knossos’.
66. Iwann
idou-Kar
etsou, Alexa
ndra (2006), ‘Apo
thn Knwso
m
ecri th Za
kro. H
perip
eteia th& prostas
ia& twn istorikw
n arcaiologikw
n cw

rwn sthn kentrik h

kai anatolik h
Krh
th’, in B. Karagiw
rgh& & A. Giannikourh
(epim.), Dia
s ws h
k ai p r ob ol h
t h& p olit is t ik h&
k ai Qus ik h&
k lhron omia
& t wn m eg alwn

nhs iwn
t h& Mes og e
iou, Aqh
na: Ypourge
io Politismou
, Arcaiologik o
Institou
to
Aigaiak w
n Spoud w
n, pp. 61–76.
67. Karetsou, Alexandra (2004), ‘Knossos after Evans: Past Interventions, Present State
and Future Solutions’, in Cadogan, Vasilakis and Hatzaki (eds), Knossos: Palace, City,
State, pp. 549–50.

230
 The ‘Palace of Minos’ at Knossos

68. Duke, Philip (2006), ‘Knossos as Memorial, Ritual, Metaphor’, in Hamilakis and
Momigliano (eds), Archaeology and European Modernity, pp. 79–88.
69. Karetsou, ‘Knossos after Evans’, p. 554.
70. Government Gazzette Nos 143/B/21-2-1989, 217/B/6-3-1998 and 1554/B/3-8-1999.
71. Cadogan, Vasilakis and Hatzaki (eds), Knossos: Palace, City, State.
72. Hamilakis (ed.), Labyrinth Revisited; MacGillivray, Joseph (2000), Minotaur: Sir Arthur
Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth, London: Jonathan Cape.
73. See papers in Driessen, Jan, Schoep, Ilse and Laffineur, Robert (eds) (2002),
Monuments of Minos: Rethinking the Minoan Palaces, Aegaeum 23, Liège and Austin:
Université de Liège and Program of Aegean Scripts and Prehistory of the University
of Texas at Austin.
74. Adams, Ellen (2006), ‘Social Strategies and Spatial Dynamics in Neopalatial
Crete: An Analysis of the North-central Area’, American Journal of Archaeology, 110,
pp. 1–36.
75. Bennett, John (2011), ‘Crete (Prehistoric to Roman)’, Archaeological Reports, 57,
pp. 63, 71.
76. Whitelaw, Bredaki and Vasilakis, ‘The Knossos Urban Landscape Project’.
77. For the importance of non-disciplinary discourses regarding the past in Greece see
Herzfeld, Michael (1991), A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan
Town, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
78. Law No. 3028/2002.
79. Government Gazzette Nos 55/AAP/30-3-2011 and 223/AAP/2-9-2011.
80. Minos, Nicolaos and Kavoulaki, M. Elisabet (2010), ‘Presentation of the works
supervised by the Knossos Scientific Committee’, in M. Andrianakis and I. Tzachili
(eds), Archaeological Work in Crete 1, Rethymno: Faculty of Letters Publications,
University of Crete, pp. 108–20.
81. Farnoux, Cnossos.
82. Karen Barad, interviewed by Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iris (2012), New
Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, p. 59.

231