(Heraklion, Crete, Greece)
After many days outside, we were ready to spend some time indoors on March 10. And with Heraklion’s Archaeological Museum (pictured above) being ranked as the second-best in Greece, we decided to pay it a lengthy visit.
The museum is arranged chronologically. We began with the oldest part (a couple of thousand years B.C.) and slowly worked our way forward in time. With the museum’s significant focus on Crete, it really helped us put our local sightseeing into perspective.
The gold “Bee Pendant” was remarkable. It is now nearly 4000 years old, but it still looks sophisticated…indeed, it looks like it could have been made today (with great effort) by a very highly skilled artist. And yet it would have been crafted with only the simplest of tools. It came from the Malia area, which we passed through a few days before on our day trip to Agios Nikolaos.
After seeing the remains of the Palace of Knossos the day before, it was very cool to see a model of what it would have looked like in its prime. It reminded me a little bit of Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. And indeed, as we had already learned, the Venetians were in Crete for a long time. But that was more than 3000 years after the Palace of Knossos was built.
I wasn’t expecting to see depictions of sports at the museum. But there it was, the remains of the famous bull-leaping fresco from the Palace of Knossos. It seems that bull-leaping was a really big deal in Minoan times, but it also was depicted in ancient Egypt and Syria. And a form of bull-leaping continues even today in southwest France. Yes, you do leap over charging bulls!
On a more sobering note, we also saw an extensive display of ancient coffins (technically, each one of these is called a “larnax”). Rather than accommodating a corpse lying flat, each unusually shaped larnax required some corpse “folding” into a fetal position.
That seemed like a good time to get some fresh air. Fortunately, the museum’s cafe area has access to a balcony overlooking Heraklion…and yet more ruins from centuries ago! History is everywhere in Crete.
The “Dolphin Fresco” is also from the Palace of Knossos. When we finally saw the surviving remnants of it at the Archaeological Museum, we had already seen a replica of it at the Palace itself…and on a thousand souvenirs and postcards! It is a pretty big deal around here.
I think these huge two-handled vases are called amphoras. While they were impressive just from a decorative perspective, I think they are also impressive to show how these ancient artifacts can be restored. If you look closely, you can see that these vases are full of cracks, and have actually been reassembled after untold years of being “broken up”.
Given how skilled the ancient Romans were at making mosaics, it is not surprising that this mosaic floor was found at the Roman city of Chersonesus. It’s actually in the Ukrainian region of Crimea, which had a Greek connection even in Roman times. Who knew?
And what would an archaeological museum be without some statues? There were many in Heraklion‘s museum, but I especially liked this one because the family pet has three heads (it’s actually Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of the Underworld).
Coming up next – another road trip!