Rambling on ruins

The ruins of the Minoan palace of Knossos is one of those incredibly peaceful places I could spend days just sitting in (well, if the crowds didn't all turn up at that precise time which I suppose is just enough to have allowed a slow start with a continental breakfast and plenty of milling between the hotel and tourbus).

There's something about ruins which makes me feel very calm, particularly if there are artfully scattered pine-trees around the place, inhabited by peacocks and cooing doves. It may be a little artificial (most of Knossos was reconstructed with a reasonable amount of guesswork by a well-intentioned but perhaps over-enthusiastically romantic English archaeologist), but the result is amazing nonetheless, particularly given the history and even mythology of the place - when it was found, it was speculated that this was the Labyrinth in which Theseus slew the Minotaur, and subsequently from here that Daedalus, creator of the Labyrinth, and his ill-fated son Icarus set out to escape using wings of Daedalus' design.

The above two legends lend names to two geographical features of Greece - one the Aegean Sea after King Aegeus, father of Theseus, who upon seeing Theseus' ship returning with black sails hoisted (Theseus was meant to hoist white if he was returning alive, but forgot), cast himself into the aforesaid body of water. The other is Ikaria, the island closest to where Icarus fell after flying too close to the sun and melting the wax of his wings - so named by a grieving Daedalus as he winged his way on (by an apparantly circuitous flightpath) to Sicily.

All happy stuff. But a lot of fun to imagine that this is one of the places, or at least was part of the culture and history, that inspired a tradition so vivid and powerful that it still holds currency thousands upon thousands of years later.