Knossos Palace

This guide to Knossos Palace in Heraklion follows Arthur Evans, the wealthy Edwardian scholar who began excavating this Bronze Age site in 1900, convinced he would prove a civilization gentler than Mycenae's warrior kings. He named its people the Minoans and read their sprawling, thousand-room palace as the mythical labyrinth of King Minos and the Minotaur. A small mix-up in the Heraklion museum, involving a fresco of a boy gathering saffron flowers, turns out to say a great deal about the man who reconstructed everything around you, right down to a priest-king figure assembled from three separate fragments.