The Ruined Ruins of Knossos

We’re no archaeologists, but in the last 2 months we’ve seen a fair few ruins of ancient civilisations. We’ve seen museums dedicated to ancient cities, we’ve been to excavation sites, and walked on the same marble streets as the Persian King Darius, Alexander the Great, numerous Roman Emperors, and many, many more. But we’re still just naïve travellers.

So when we visited the famous ruins of Knossos, in Crete, and found concrete steps, a bright red painting of a bull on a wall, and poured concrete columns, scepticism more than crept into our minds. It turns out that Arthur Evans, a wealthy English “self-taught archaeologist” had bought the site less than a century ago, excavated it, and built structures upon it to make what he thought it might have looked like thousands of years ago. He even decided that it was a totally different civilisation from any other "discovered" at the time, so coined the term Minoan.

While hundreds of people snapped photos and queued to look at the fake “artifacts”, our healthy Gen-Y cynicism kicked in more and more as we read the signs stating what “Arthur Evans believed to have been on this site”.

I generally try not to be too negative or to seem ungrateful(most of the time), so the big positive from visiting Arthur’s Minoan Fantasy Land and reading the “Ruins for Dummies, by Dummies” information boards, was an enhanced appreciation for the all the other places in the world that have been painstakingly preserved and restored.