Heraklion Archaeological Museum: Reading Minoan Art After the Site Visit

The Heraklion Archaeological Museum, in the centre of Crete’s capital, holds the finest collection of Minoan art in the world: the frescoes, figurines, stone vessels, jewellery, seals and clay tablets excavated at Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Hagia Triada and dozens of other sites across the island. Its 27 galleries cover some five and a half thousand years, from the Neolithic to Roman times. For anyone who has just walked the ruins of a Minoan palace, it is the other half of the story. The site shows you the walls, courts and storerooms; the museum shows you what filled them. On our Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus tour we visit Knossos on the morning of Day 6 and spend the afternoon here.

Why the museum matters after the palace

Minoan palaces are hard places to imagine full. At Knossos you walk past empty storerooms, bare courts and rooms whose painted walls survive only as reconstructions. Almost everything portable that was found in them was lifted, recorded and taken to Heraklion, and the museum, founded as a simple collection of antiquities in 1883, grew into the central archive of Minoan civilisation.

That makes the order of a visit important. Seen first, the objects in the museum are beautiful but placeless. Seen a few hours after walking through the palace they came from, they slot into rooms you have stood in: the jars belong to the storerooms in the west wing, the tablets to the archive that recorded them, the frescoes to walls you have just looked at. Our guide to Knossos palace and the Evans legacy covers the site itself; this article is its companion, about how to read the objects.

A building designed for the collection

The present building is itself worth a moment’s attention. The first purpose-built museum, put up between 1904 and 1912, was badly shaken by earthquakes in 1926, 1930 and 1935. The archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos, then the museum’s director and later the excavator of Akrotiri on Santorini, pressed for a replacement, and in 1935 the architect Patroklos Karantinos was engaged to design it. Built from 1937 to 1940 on the site of a Catholic monastery of Saint Francis destroyed in an earthquake in 1856, it was designed to resist earthquakes and is an important example of modernist architecture in Greece. Karantinos lit the galleries from above and along the tops of the walls, so that the objects are seen in even daylight.

The building was damaged during the Second World War, though the collection survived intact, and the museum reopened in 1952. Most of it closed for a long renovation in 2006 and reopened from 2013, with the displays rearranged into the sequence visitors see today.

How the Heraklion Archaeological Museum tells the story

The displays run broadly in time order and are grouped by theme. The ground-floor galleries follow the rise of Minoan society, from Neolithic beginnings through the first palaces to the height of palatial power, with rooms that bring together finds from sanctuaries, cemeteries, towns and palaces. Upstairs are the wall paintings from Knossos and other sites, and the galleries of the later, historical periods, with sculpture, coins and inscriptions from Classical and Roman Crete.

That arrangement shapes how you understand the sites. Grouping objects by period lets you see Knossos, Phaistos and Malia side by side at the same moment, rather than as separate monuments. It also makes clear how much the Minoan world changed over a thousand years, from the first palaces built around 1900 BC to the period of mainland Greek control in the fourteenth century BC.

Palace, household and ritual in the collection

Some of the earliest objects to look for are the pots in what is called Kamares ware, made around 2000 to 1700 BC and named after the cave on Mount Ida where examples were first found. Their walls are sometimes eggshell-thin, painted in white, red and orange on a dark ground with swirling plant and spiral patterns. Fine pottery like this has been found mainly at palace sites, which suggests it was made in or for the palaces.

Ritual objects are among the most famous pieces in the museum. The two faience figurines known as the Snake Goddesses were found in 1903 in stone-lined cists at Knossos that Evans called the Temple Repositories, and they date to around 1600 BC. They are worth looking at closely, because both are partly restored: the smaller figure had no head when it was found, and its head was recreated by Evans and a restorer. Whether they represent goddesses, priestesses or worshippers is still debated. Nearby, the bull’s-head rhyton from Knossos, a ritual vessel carved in dark stone in the shape of a bull’s head, shows how central the bull was to Minoan religious imagery.

Other objects speak of daily life and display. The Harvester Vase, a black steatite vessel found at Hagia Triada in 1902 and dating to about 1550 to 1500 BC, carries a relief of some 27 men marching in procession, one of them holding a sistrum, a kind of rattle, and apparently singing. Scholars disagree on whether it shows a harvest festival, a religious procession or something else, which is part of its fascination. Hagia Triada lies close to Phaistos, and the tour visits both on Day 8; our article on Phaistos and the Mesara Plain describes the setting the vase came from.

Scripts, seals and the Phaistos Disc

The palaces were administrative centres, and the museum holds the evidence of how they kept records. Clay tablets in Linear A, the Minoan script that has never been deciphered, sit alongside tablets in Linear B, the later script deciphered in 1952 as an early form of Greek. Seal stones, small engraved stones used to mark goods and documents, show how authority was stamped onto everyday transactions.

The single most famous object here is the Phaistos Disc. Found by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier on 3 July 1908 at the palace of Phaistos, it is a disc of fired clay about 16 centimetres across, covered on both sides by a spiral of 242 signs. Each sign was pressed into the wet clay with a separate stamp, which makes it one of the earliest known examples of printing with movable type. The script has never been deciphered, and with no other example to compare it with, it may never be. Estimates of its date vary widely, and although some scholars once suspected it was a forgery, most now accept it as genuine.

Gold, jewellery and the bees of Malia

Among the gold work, look for the pendant from Malia, about 4.6 centimetres high, made around 1700 BC and found in 1930 in the cemetery of Chrysolakkos near the palace. Two insects, usually called bees, face each other around a central disc, with three smaller discs hanging from their wings and bodies, though one study argues they may not be bees at all. It is one of the most accomplished pieces of Minoan goldsmithing. The tour visits Malia on Day 7, the day after the museum; our article on Malia palace and its coastal setting explains where it was found.

Reading the Knossos frescoes upstairs

The frescoes are the best-known exhibits in the museum, and the ones that most need careful looking. They include the bull-leaping fresco from Knossos, showing young men and women vaulting over a charging bull, the fragment of a woman nicknamed La Parisienne, the dolphins, and the painted relief known as the Prince of the Lilies. Alongside them is the painted limestone sarcophagus from Hagia Triada, from about 1370 to 1320 BC, with scenes of sacrifice, music and offerings, the only Minoan object to show a funeral ritual in narrative form.

What you are looking at, in most cases, is a combination of ancient fragments and twentieth-century restoration. Arthur Evans employed the Swiss artist Émile Gilliéron and later his son, also Émile, as restorers at Knossos for more than thirty years. They assembled scattered fragments into complete compositions, filling the gaps with their own painting. Much of their work has stood up well, but some of it has not. The Prince of the Lilies is the clearest case: Evans first thought the fragments came from three different figures, and the Gilliérons joined them into one. Scholars still debate which way the figure faced and whether the lily crown belongs with the body at all. The bull-leaping scene, too, is the most completely restored of several similar panels.

The displays often make this visible if you look for it, because the surviving fragments can frequently be told apart from the modern painting around them. Spending a few minutes working out which is which is one of the most rewarding things you can do here, because it shows exactly how much of our picture of the Minoans rests on surviving evidence and how much on early twentieth-century interpretation.

How long should you allow at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum?

Allow two to three hours for a full visit. On the tour, the museum takes up much of the afternoon after Knossos, with a local guide, before a walk through the old town of Heraklion. With 27 galleries, it is better to see the Minoan rooms properly than to try to cover everything.

Is the museum easy to get around?

Yes, more so than most archaeological sites. Public areas are wheelchair accessible, there is a ramp at the main entrance, a lift between floors and accessible toilets, and a wheelchair is available at the entrance. The galleries are under cover, so the main demand is standing and walking slowly from case to case. Large bags and backpacks must be left in the cloakroom. Hours vary by season and day, and we confirm them before each departure. Over the whole tour, which is rated Level 2, Moderate, expect three to five hours of activity a day.

From the museum to the rest of Crete

The museum is the hinge of the tour’s days on Crete. It follows Knossos and comes before Malia and Phaistos, so it both explains what you have seen and prepares you for what is to come. For the wider sweep of the island’s history, from the Minoans through the Venetians and Ottomans to modern Crete, our guide to Crete’s history is the place to start. For how Crete fits into the whole journey, from Santorini’s volcanic landscape to Rhodes and Cyprus, see our Eastern Mediterranean islands itinerary.

Few museums can claim to be the essential partner of a single civilisation, but the museum in Heraklion is exactly that for the Minoans. Seen on the same day as the palace whose finds it holds, with time to look past the reconstructions to the fragments beneath, it turns a famous ruin into a world of people, rituals and records. To see it this way, in a small group of 6 to 14 travellers, explore the Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus small group tour.