The Palace of Knossos, on a low hill near the modern city of Heraklion, is the most renowned tourist attraction in the island of Crete, a World Heritage Site, and the second most-visited archaeological site in Greece after the Parthenon. As the world woke up and tourism recovered after the pandemic, visitors queued for hours for admission last summer – a record 8,000 on one day – entranced by the legends of King Minos and his happy world of beautiful youths processing among flowering plants and butterflies, dancers soaring in daring leaps over the backs of mighty bulls, and gorgeously costumed bare-breasted goddesses fearlessly holding snakes.
The major exhibition about Knossos and the Minoan world opening at the Ashmolean in Oxford in February (Labyrinth: Knossos, myth and reality) is surprisingly the museum’s first, even though it holds the most important collection outside Greece, and its own history is intimately connected with the archaeology of the site. Sir Arthur Evans, the museum’s keeper in 1884-1908, led the transformation of the Ashmolean from natural history to the art and archaeology museum in an imposing building it is today. He was also the scholar and archaeologist who helped create the modern fame of Knossos, a Bronze Age palace complex wreathed in later Greek legends telling of the labyrinth created by Daedalus to house the Minotaur, the monstrous offspring of a queen and a bull, the sacrificial offerings of Athenian youths to said creature, and the rescue of the Athenian hero Theseus by the beautiful – and later abandoned – Princess Ariadne, with the aid of the ball of thread.
These legends fascinated centuries of travellers who were shown a stone quarry with its myriad tunnels and dead ends as the site of the mythical labyrinth. Their power endures, and the exhibition includes 20th-century images of the Minotaur by Pablo Picasso and Michael Ayrton, and the labyrinths created for London tube stations by Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger.
