Palace of Knossos

The great palace of Minoan Crete, known for its downward-tapering red columns and bull frescoes.

The site is dominated by the huge Palace of Minos, first built around 1900 BC and rebuilt on a grander scale after an earthquake-like destruction around 1700 BC. Most scholars see it as a centre for government, trade, religion and ceremony. Greek myths linked it to King Minos, the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. In 2025 it was listed by UNESCO as part of the Minoan Palatial Centres.

The Minoan palace

At its height, from about 1700 to 1450 BC, the palace had a great central court, grand staircases, storerooms, reception rooms, light wells, drains and richly painted walls. Pottery, frescoes and records show that Knossos traded and swapped ideas across Crete and the eastern Mediterranean. After about 1450 BC it came under Mycenaean Greek influence, and clay tablets in an early form of Greek, called Linear B, record its stores of goods and animals.

The Labyrinth legend

In the Greek myths, King Minos had Daedalus build the Labyrinth to hold the Minotaur, a creature with a man's body and a bull's head. The hero Theseus beat it with help from Ariadne's thread. Nobody knows whether the palace inspired the story, but its twisting plan of courts, corridors and stairs may have helped create the Labyrinth idea. Ancient coins from Knossos even showed a labyrinth pattern.

Digging up Knossos

The first known modern dig was in 1878 and 1879, led by the Cretan merchant Minos Kalokairinos, who uncovered storerooms with giant jars called pithoi. A long, careful survey around the site has since shown that people lived in the area from about 7000 BC all the way into modern times, and that Knossos stayed important through the Greek, Roman and early Byzantine periods.

On the globe

The model shows the palace with its red columns that get narrower toward the bottom.