Walk the palace at Knossos where the labyrinth was said to be

Knossos is the Minoan palace a few kilometers outside Heraklion that the legend of King Minos, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur belongs to. It is less a single building than a hillside of rooms: four wings around a central court, with a throne room, halls, storerooms, workshops and a stone theater, several stories high in places. Walking it is the quickest way to see why the word labyrinth stuck.

The group is through the gate when it opens, with a guide, while the stone is still cool.

Then the red columns. They are reconstructions, the work of Arthur Evans, who dug here from 1900 to 1931 and rebuilt parts of the palace in a way people have argued about ever since. Everyone takes the photo anyway.

The first man to dig at Knossos, in 1878, was a local merchant whose name was also Minos: Minos Kalokairinos. The palace covers about 22,000 square meters, the largest on Crete, and in 2025 it went onto the UNESCO World Heritage List together with five other Minoan palaces, one of which, Kydonia, lies under the streets of Chania.