Heraklion Archaeological Museum

The Heraklion Archaeological Museum is the reference collection for Minoan Crete: because Cretan antiquities law has kept excavated material on the island since the early twentieth century, the finds from Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros and Hagia Triada sit here rather than in the museums of the foreign expeditions that dug them up, making this the single place to see the primary evidence behind more than a century of Minoan scholarship, alongside a continuous run of later Cretan material through Roman Gortyn.

The museum stands in central Heraklion at the junction of Xanthoudidou and Hatzidaki streets, on a plot previously occupied by the Venetian-era Monastery of St Francis, destroyed by an earthquake in 1856; the ruins are still visible in the museum's garden. The present building was designed by the architect Patroklos Karantinos and built in stages between 1935 and 1958, and is counted, on the museum's own account, as an important example of Greek Modernist architecture. Its coloured, veined-marble-effect revetments were chosen to echo the painted imitation-marble finishes of the Minoan palaces the collection describes, and the two-storey plan holds extensive exhibition rooms, laboratories and an audiovisual room in addition to the galleries a visitor sees.

The site had already carried an earlier purpose-built museum, put up in the first decade of the twentieth century, before a run of earthquakes in the 1920s and 1930s damaged it badly enough to force the reconstruction that produced the building standing today. The museum's collection is older still: it dates its own founding to 1883, when Crete's antiquities, then still under Ottoman administration, began to be gathered into a formal public collection rather than dispersed piece by piece to foreign excavators and private buyers, a pattern that had already carried a great deal of Cretan material out of the island before there was anywhere on Crete to keep it.

The Heraklion Archaeological Museum holds artefacts spanning roughly 5,500 years, from the Neolithic period through the Roman era, but it is built, deliberately, around the Minoan Bronze Age, and it is the single largest and most complete collection of Minoan material anywhere. That is a direct consequence of where the excavations happened: Knossos, Phaistos, Malia, Zakros, Hagia Triada and the other major Minoan palace and villa sites are all on Crete, and Cretan antiquities law has, since the early twentieth century, kept excavated finds on the island rather than allowing them to leave for the museums of the excavating nations, unlike the pattern that took so much of Aegean archaeology to London, Berlin and Paris in the same period. The result is that a visitor who wants to see the material culture behind Arthur Evans's reconstruction of Knossos, or the undisturbed grave goods from tombs the passage of a century did not manage to loot, has to come to Heraklion; a great deal of the primary evidence for what is known and disputed about Minoan civilisation simply is not held anywhere else.

The current arrangement of the galleries, unveiled when the museum reopened after a long building renovation in 2014, sets the ground floor aside for the Minoan sequence proper, moving chronologically from Neolithic Crete through the Old and New Palace periods, and reserves the first floor for the material that follows the palaces' end: the frescoes as a themed room in their own right, and then Subminoan, Geometric, Archaic and Hellenistic galleries carrying the story through to Roman Gortyn. A sculpture hall of Hellenistic and Roman work closes the sequence. The museum states that a number of these later-period objects were being shown publicly for the first time when the new galleries opened, material that under the old, more crowded display had simply had nowhere to go.

Among some 5,800 exhibited objects, the Phaistos Disc is the one visitors ask after by name. It is a disc of fired clay, roughly 16 centimetres across, stamped on both faces, apparently before firing, with a spiral run of pictographic signs unlike the two known Cretan scripts, Linear A and Linear B, or any other writing system from the ancient Aegean. It was found in 1908 by the Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier during excavation of the palace at Phaistos, in a context generally dated to around 1700 BC. More than a century of proposed decipherments, none of them accepted by the field as a whole, has not settled what the disc says, who made it, or even, given that nothing else like it has surfaced anywhere in the intervening century, whether it was made on Crete at all. The museum displays it in its own case among the ground-floor Old Palace material, unresolved status and all; nothing on the label promises a solution the scholarship does not have.

The Hall of the Frescoes gathers the wall paintings lifted from Knossos and other palace sites, and it is where the museum's most photographed images hang: the Prince of the Lilies, the Bull-Leaping fresco, and La Parisienne, sometimes shown as part of the Ladies in Blue group. What the room does not advertise on the wall labels, and what is worth a visitor knowing before they go, is how much of each painting is nineteenth- and twentieth-century restoration rather than surviving ancient plaster. The classicist Mary Beard, writing in the New York Review of Books on the state of Knossos scholarship, put the general pattern plainly: "the more famous the image now is, the less of it is actually ancient." The Prince of the Lilies was restored in 1905 by the Swiss artist Emile Gillieron from a small crowned head, part of a torso and part of a thigh, no face was ever found among the fragments, and Beard and others have questioned whether every piece used even came from the same original figure. The Ladies in Blue survived the 1926 Heraklion earthquake and was restored again afterward by Gillieron's son, Edouard, meaning some of what a visitor sees is a twentieth-century artist's second attempt at a painting already once reconstructed. None of this makes the frescoes fakes; it makes them collaborations between a Bronze Age painter and an Edwardian restorer, and the museum's own presentation, while it does credit the Gillierons as restorers, does not walk a visitor through fragment by fragment how much of each image in front of them is which.

The Ring of Minos is displayed, on the museum's own current account, as a straightforward exceptional object: a large gold signet ring found in 1928 near the Royal Temple Tomb at Knossos, examined at the time by the excavator of Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans, and by the archaeologist Nikolaos Platon, neither of whom doubted it was genuine. That account leaves out most of the ring's documented history. A third senior archaeologist, Spyridon Marinatos, the excavator of Thera, judged the ring a modern forgery, and as Marinatos's standing in Greek archaeology grew in the postwar decades, his view prevailed enough that the ring effectively dropped out of the record; the object itself went missing from where it had been kept. It stayed missing for more than seventy years. In 2001, a retired police officer named Georgios Kazantzis found the ring, according to a contemporary account in the archaeology journal Anistoriton, set into the fireplace wall of a house he had inherited in Crete; he handed it to the Greek Archaeological Service, and this time the Central Archaeological Board examined it and pronounced it authentic, on the strength partly of comparable iconography that had turned up at other Minoan sites in the decades since 1928 (Kazantzis received the finder's reward set by Greek law, reported as EUR 400,000). The scene on the ring, a goddess appearing in the air, on land and at sea over a tree-cult ritual, is now treated as one of the clearer statements of Minoan religious iconography to survive; the eighty-year argument over whether it was ancient at all is not part of the story the museum tells about it today.

The museum keeps different hours across the year: a winter timetable from 1 December to 31 March, a short April schedule, and extended summer hours from 28 April to 31 October, with Wednesdays running later than the rest of the week in every season; full admission is EUR 20, with a EUR 12 reduced rate and a substantial list of free-admission categories, including EU citizens 25 and under, disabled visitors and an escort, and free entry on the first and third Sunday of the month from November to March. Photography without flash is allowed in the galleries for personal use; professional shoots and filming need a prior application. Bags go into a ground-floor cloakroom, and mobile phone use is not permitted in the exhibition rooms. Most visitors allow two to three hours, and reviewers consistently suggest combining the visit with the Knossos palace site a short drive away, arguing that each makes more sense once the other has been seen.

Visitors consistently describe the collection as far larger and more important than they expected, and repeatedly recommend pairing the museum with a visit to the Knossos site itself, one to explain the other. The 2014 rehang is credited with a clear, well-labelled, air-conditioned chronological layout that copes with large summer crowds; recent reviewers who also remember the museum from decades ago report it has improved substantially since then.