Knossos Palace: Minoan Administration, Archaeology and the Evans Legacy

Five kilometres south of the old harbour of Heraklion, on a low rise called Kephala hill, lie the remains of the largest Bronze Age centre on Crete. Knossos palace is one of the most visited ancient sites in Greece, drawing close to a million people a year, and one of the hardest to read. What you walk through is three things at once: the ruins of a building that served Minoan Crete for more than five centuries, the evidence of how it was run, and the confident early twentieth-century rebuilding of Sir Arthur Evans. On our Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus tour we spend the morning of Day 6 at Knossos and the afternoon with its finds in Heraklion, which is the best way we know to untangle the three.

A hill settled for five thousand years before the palace

The palace was not built on empty ground. People were living on Kephala hill by about 7000 BC, making Knossos one of the oldest settled places in the Aegean, and the deep layers of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age occupation beneath the palace are part of what makes the site so important to archaeologists. The setting explains the choice. The hill sits in the valley of the Kairatos stream, with access to the north coast and its harbour, to farmland on the valley slopes, and to routes running south into the interior of the island.

By around 1900 BC the people of Knossos had levelled the top of the hill and raised the first palace on the platform. It was destroyed around 1700 BC, probably by an earthquake or a series of them, and rebuilt on a larger and grander scale. This second, or Neopalatial, palace is the building whose plan survives. At its height it covered roughly 20,000 square metres and rose in places to several storeys, arranged around a great rectangular central court.

Knossos was the largest of several palatial centres on Crete, not the only one. On the following two days the tour visits the coastal palace of Malia, east of Heraklion, and Phaistos above the Mesara Plain, and the comparison is instructive: the same idea of a building organised around a central court, adapted to very different landscapes. For the wider sweep of Cretan history from the Minoans to the Venetians and beyond, our guide to Crete’s history sets Knossos in context.

What was Knossos palace actually for?

It was the administrative, economic and ceremonial centre of a large territory, and probably, though not certainly, a ruler’s residence as well. Arthur Evans called it the Palace of Minos and pictured a priest-king on a throne, and the word “palace” has stuck. Many archaeologists now prefer to think of it as a complex that gathered, stored and redistributed the produce of the surrounding region, staged religious and civic ceremonies, and housed workshops, rather than primarily as a royal home.

The clearest evidence for that role lies along the west side of the building. Here a corridor opens onto a long row of narrow storerooms, the magazines, where huge clay storage jars called pithoi held oil, grain and wine. Standing beside these jars, some taller than a visitor, it is easy to understand that much of the palace’s power rested on control of food: who brought it in, who recorded it, and who received it again.

The central court tied the whole complex together. Wings of rooms opened onto it from every side, and its scale suggests gatherings and rituals rather than everyday traffic. To the north-west, a paved road and a set of broad, shallow steps that Evans called the Theatral Area seem designed for processions and for spectators to watch them.

Clay tablets and the scripts of Knossos

Storage on this scale needed record-keeping, and Knossos has given us more of it than any other site on Crete. Minoan administrators first used a script of signs known as Cretan hieroglyphic, and then Linear A. Linear A has never been deciphered, so the language of the people who built the palace is still unknown.

The later records are a different story. Within about a week of starting work in 1900, Evans found clay tablets written in a second linear script, the most abundant at the site, which he named Linear B. For half a century it resisted every attempt to read it. Then, on 1 July 1952, the architect Michael Ventris announced in a BBC broadcast that Linear B was an early form of Greek. Working with the Cambridge philologist John Chadwick, he used the Knossos tablets to show that they are administrative records, the working accounts of the palace.

That decipherment changed the history of the palace. Greek-speaking administrators were keeping its accounts in its final phase, which means that after the widespread disruption across Minoan Crete around 1450 BC, Knossos came under the control of people from the Mycenaean world of mainland Greece. The final destruction of the palace is conventionally dated to around 1350 BC, though the date is still debated. The wider Bronze Age world that Knossos belonged to is the subject of our article on the Bronze Age civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean islands.

The Throne Room and the question of who sat there

The most famous room at Knossos is small. Evans uncovered it in 1900, in the first season: a chamber with gypsum benches along its walls, a high-backed stone seat set against the north wall, painted griffins facing the throne from either side, and a sunken area opposite that Evans called a lustral basin and associated with ritual washing. It is often described as the oldest throne room in Europe.

Evans saw a priest-king seated in state and linked the throne directly to Minos. Other scholars have suggested that the seat belonged to a priestess who represented a goddess, or that the benches point to a council rather than a monarch. Some date the room in its final form to the period of mainland control after 1450 BC, which would make it a Mycenaean statement of authority rather than a Minoan one. None of these readings is proven, and that open question is worth carrying with you into the room.

Kalokairinos, Evans and the excavation of Knossos

Evans was not the first to dig at Knossos. In 1878 a local antiquarian, Minos Kalokairinos, opened trenches on Kephala hill and exposed storerooms in the west wing and the corner of what would later be identified as the Throne Room. The Ottoman authorities who then governed Crete stopped the work after about three weeks. Twenty years later, during the violence of 1898, his home was looted and burned, and much of his collection was lost.

Only after Ottoman rule on Crete ended could a full excavation go ahead. Evans began in 1900 and worked at Knossos until 1931, with the archaeologist Duncan Mackenzie among his closest collaborators. The scale of what they uncovered was immense, and Evans gave the civilisation its modern name, Minoan, after the legendary king.

How Evans rebuilt Knossos

Evans did not leave the palace as he found it. Walls and floors that survived only in fragments, and upper storeys that had collapsed, raised a practical problem of protection and an interpretive temptation he could not resist. From 1904 to 1905 the architect Christian Doll rebuilt the collapsing Grand Staircase, using steel joists and brick vaulting, and replaced the vanished timber columns, whose imprints had been found in the excavation, with concrete. From the 1920s the artist and architect Piet de Jong worked with Evans on what Evans called “reconstitution”, restoring whole rooms and upper floors in reinforced concrete, painted to resemble the Minoan originals, with frescoes completed by artists working for him.

The result is the Knossos of the photographs: dark-red columns that taper towards the base, black capitals, upper rooms you can look into, painted walls. It is also the source of a long argument. Critics have pointed out that some reconstructions, such as the bastion of the north entrance with its charging bull, rest on very little evidence. In the 1930s the philosopher R. G. Collingwood joked that Knossian architecture seemed to consist of “garages and public lavatories”. Others answer that the rebuilding helps visitors grasp the scale and height of a multi-storey building that would otherwise read as a maze of low walls.

Both views are fair, and the best way to visit is to keep them in mind together. Some of the reinforced concrete is now more than a century old and is itself being conserved, so the reconstructions have become a historic layer of the site in their own right: a record of how one archaeologist imagined the Bronze Age in the early 1900s.

Was there really a labyrinth at Knossos?

Not in the sense of the myth. No maze built to hold a monster has been found, and Greek stories of King Minos, the Minotaur, Theseus, Ariadne and the craftsman Daedalus were told and retold long after the palace had fallen. Yet it is easy to see how the legend could have grown from the building. The ruins of a structure of a great many rooms, corridors and stairways on several levels would have been bewildering to anyone who walked through them centuries later. Some scholars connect the word labyrinth with labrys, the double axe that appears as a sacred symbol at Knossos, though that derivation is debated.

Is Knossos a UNESCO World Heritage Site?

Yes. In July 2025 UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee inscribed the Minoan Palatial Centres on the World Heritage List. The listing groups six sites across Crete: Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, Zominthos and Kydonia. Three of them, Knossos, Malia and Phaistos, fall on consecutive days of our itinerary, from Day 6 to Day 8.

How long does a visit to Knossos take?

Allow at least two hours on the site itself, and more if you like to linger. That is enough to walk the main route past the west court and magazines, the central court, the Throne Room, the reconstructed upper floors and the north entrance. On the tour we visit in the morning with a local guide and spend the afternoon at the museum.

How much walking is involved at Knossos?

A moderate amount, much of it on uneven ground. Visitors keep to set routes and timber walkways that protect the ancient floors and doorways, and the original paving is worn and can be slippery in places, so sturdy, flat shoes are essential. There are steps and gentle slopes between the levels of the palace, and the Greek authorities have acknowledged that parts of the site are difficult for wheelchairs. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2, Moderate: three to five hours of activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground. Practical questions about Greece in general, from currency to the best time of year, are covered in our answers to common questions about Greece.

Should you see the Heraklion Archaeological Museum before or after Knossos?

After, ideally on the same day, which is how the tour is arranged. The site shows you the setting, scale and plan of the palace; the museum holds the objects that were found there, including fragments of the best-known frescoes, such as the bull-leaping scene, along with clay tablets, seal stones, and stone and pottery vessels. Seeing the building first gives every object a place to belong. Our guide to the Heraklion Archaeological Museum explains how to read its Minoan collection once you have walked through the palace.

Knossos and the wider Aegean

Knossos did not stand alone. Minoan pottery, styles of wall painting and goods travelled across the Aegean, and some of the finest Aegean wall paintings outside Crete lie a short sea crossing to the north, at Akrotiri on Santorini, where a Bronze Age port town was preserved beneath volcanic ash. The tour visits Akrotiri on Day 3, so by the time you reach Knossos you have already seen the Minoan world from the outside, in a town shaped by trade with Crete.

Knossos rewards a patient visit. The palace was a working centre of storage, record-keeping and ceremony for centuries, the setting of a Greek myth that has outlived it by three thousand years, and the subject of an archaeological rebuilding that is now historic in its own right. Seen alongside Akrotiri, Malia and Phaistos, and then set within the whole journey described in our Eastern Mediterranean islands itinerary, it becomes far more than a famous ruin. To see it this way in a small group of 6 to 14 travellers, with time in the museum the same afternoon, explore the Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus small group tour.