Day 23: Labyrinth.

I am pretty seriously amused right now. I have just toured the Palace of Knossos- home of the ancient Minoan civilization, on the island of Crete. We studied this place in school, with it's off-kilter upside-down columnst and lustral basins and ridiculously intricate floor plan. For some reason, as I was paring down my list of must-sees along the way, I just couldn't drop this one off, as long as it was within striking distance of Athens.

"Striking distance" is actually a bit of a stretch, depending on your definition. Because of the off-season ferry schedules, there was no painless way to get here and back, so I've committed myself to two consecutive overnight ferries. Arriving here in the dark at 6 am. Returning tomorrow to Athens at 5 am, doubly painful because the subway doesn't run until 5:50, and my hotel check-in is at 2. So, this was work. I figured that when a boat big enough to have goth a swimming pool and a night club comes ashore at dawn, someone would have coffee brewing somewhere- not exactly. Because I am just that smart, I also managed to store my Heraklion map in my luggage, locked up at the hotel in Athens. So, having no better option, I went with the "walk uphill" tactic hoping to find something promising in the dark. Other than a stand serving french fries (??) to cab drivers, the streets were dark.

6 am dark, though, isn't as scary as, say, 1 am dark. For starters, you know the sun will eventually come up; also, it's not like there are drunkies stumbling out of bars around you or something. Wrong again: 6 am and the music is still thumping, and bouncers are still camped out in their doorways from last night. Two women, I'd say early 50's, sail out into the street dressed as pirates. Thankfully, about 15 minutes uphill in the dark, there were signs of life- coffee and a 24/7 internet cafe, full of adolescent gamers before dawn. Good place to pull up a map, at least, and watch the sun come up.

All that aside, I made it to the Palace. Frankly, it's mostly rubble. You can at least trace the massive web of foundations around this giant complex. The most fun, though, is the re-invented areas. I'd say "re-constructed" or "preserved" but those are pretty far off the mark. At some point in time, a guy from Oxford got involved with this place and gained permission to excavate. In his day I don't think his methods raised any eyebrows, but by our standards of historic preservation, he took some giant liberties. Because the crumbling sparkly gypsum foundations were so badly weathered, he thought concrete reinforcement might be a good idea. He pieced together some rooms here, some corners there, with a good dose of both imagination and European flair. He painted things. He built things. He detailed faux wood grain in paint on the concrete beams, for effect. He vividly described "lustral basins" as sacred ritual pools, although there's no evidence they actually held water. He named one reconstruction the "Piano Nobile," as if this were a Venetian Palazzo. He conjectured "tri-columnar shrines" and made up all kinds of purposes for rooms, which he lovingly re-imaged with a combination of original stone, concrete, and liberal paint. It's as if a 12-year old were given a set of legos and an hour, and you said, "GO! See what this might have been."

And it is, after all, really interesting. Seeing it in person, I think this man was at least a little nutty, if not downright Quixotic, but his handprint is everywhere, and you can't help but like him. The bright colors do bring the place to life, a little, and lustral basins seem as plausible an explanation as any other, and who's to say that wasn't a throne room, after all? In some places, sure, he was way off (faux wood-grain concrete, for example) but he did make some sound educated guesses about Minoan architecture and culture. At some point I went from, "Hmm, interesting foundation patterns," to "this guy is a combination of Indiana Jones and the Mad Hatter and Walt Disney." It's worth a trip.

The real reason I came, I confess, wasn't for the Palace at all. It was for the myth of King Minos and the Minotaur, because I am seriously just a big kid. I know, academically, that there wasn't really a labyrinth here, if "here" is actually the origin of that story as rumored. If you look at a floor plan, you'd just have to describe it as "labyrinthine," because that's just how those cagey Minoans built. Probably it did keep people from barging into the king's throne room, as there's no direct way to get anywhere. Even so. I wanted to see the seeds of that story, and traipse around the labyrinth. And I did. I feel a little like I did when I went to Loch Ness years ago, and tried really, really hard to see the Loch Ness Monster. And I'd do it again today. I know. Unlikely on every level. To try and spot one of these mythical creatures defies all logic- but really, deep down, don't you want to believe that you could?