The Palace of Knossos
Summary
The Palace of Knossos is Crete’s most famous attraction and the former capital of the Minoans, the first advanced civilization in all of Europe. To put its age into context, the Minoan civilization started as early as 3500BC, with the more complex urban civilization around 2000BC – the oldest advanced civilization in the world was the Sumerians in 3000BC, the Pyramid of Giza was built 2500BC, the Ancient Greek Dark Ages only started in 1200BC/ 800BC, Rome was only founded in 753BC and starts to branch outside of Italy in 250BC. Indeed – Old AF and with the added mystery that we still don’t know how they collapsed in 1450BC
The problem with Knossos though is that it is very hard to contextualize this history and bring it to life. This is not a criticism of the restoration work that has been done, it is actually very impressive, more just the broad difficulties for a site quite this old. So, my tips:
- Biggest one – try and read up on the Minoans before you arrive, otherwise you run the risk of your visit feeling a bit like one of those school trips where you wander around a little bored and starting at a bunch of old stones with not that much meaning. Instead, you want to be imaging what this place was like and how far ahead of its time it really was
- Get there before 10am – we noticed a clear increase in fellow tourists at 10am as the coach loads arrived and, if visiting in summer, it avoids the energy sapping heat of the day
- Take full advantage of the rest of Crete – I look forward to returning to Crete one day to venture further out to see the more remote eastern end, hike Europe’s longest gorge and rent a car to go exploring all across the island. In my trip, I did what most do – fly into Iraklio, sit in a hotel by the pool, visit Knossos and have a few nice meals. Pleasant, but not exactly a wow experience
highlights
#1 Getting the chance to wander through this ground-breaking site and try to understand just how ahead of its time it was
#2 The views over the site and the valley around
#3 Piecing together what Knossos might have looked like at its height
#4 Getting a brief glimpse into what it must have been like in day-to-day life at the site
Experiences nearby
The below map shows experiences nearby with a colour that reflect the Overall Score of those experiences
Other Ancient Ruin Experiences
Score Detail
Background - how many times have you asked someone what a travel experience was like and the response was "amazing" or "awesome"? That response is nice to know, but it makes it hard to differentiate that experience compared to others. That is exactly what these scores are trying to do - differentiate the experience by giving a score out of 10 based on 6 categories and then giving an overall experience score
This overall experience score is calculated by: take the highest of the "Culture" or "Nature" score (1-10) + "Fun factor" (1-10) + "Avoiding the crowds" (1-10) + highest of the "Unique" or "World Famous score" (1-10). Then convert into a score out of 100
Extra detail - the logic being that I find all of the 6 individual scores important, but I don't want to mark an experience down just because it doesn't cover both "Culture" and "Nature", or because it isn't both "World Famous" and "Unique". Take the examples of Safari in The Serengeti and walking through Rome - they both appeal at opposite ends of the nature / culture spectrum, and you can have a fantastic time without needing to appeal to both sides. So, their overall scores aren't penalized for their lack of one or the other, and I've done the same for "World Famous" vs "Unique". But . . . I do think that the "Fun factor" of an experience is important, irrelevant of other factors, and so is "Avoiding the Crowds" (or where there are crowds that add to the experience). So, both of these scores are standalone