Palace of Knossos, Throne Room

Archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans excavated this site and rebuilt many rooms in concrete, as he envisioned they might have looked. His work does help you picture what it was like to be inside a Minoan palace. A restored courtyard reveals the pleasing effect of a Minoan peristyle, square pillars alternating with round wooden columns that taper downward, are painted in earthy reds.

Fragments of the original frescoes were recovered from the crumbled, charred remains and painstakingly pieced together. The restored results are on exhibit at the Museum of Archaeology in Heráklion.

I asked our taxi driver why so many of the taxis were Mercedes, and he said many of the winter tourists on Crete are German, and they insist on riding in a German vehicle. This Mercedes (1976) has been driven over 2,000,000 km (1,250,000 miles), and is on its third engine, he said. It’s a taxi 24 hours a day, one driver after another. (Did a little arithmetic — the car had to go 250 mile a day, each and every day for all those years. Doesn’t seem logical, but it’s possible.)

As you can see, the day we visited the Palace, the King, as so often is the case, was on a throne, but this throne did not need flushed!