AA-2026-C8EB6C
On the image
By the 1950s the Palace of Knossos had already been rebuilt once by its excavator, and the tourists arriving with their cameras took the concrete and repainted timber as more or less what the Bronze Age had left behind. Sir Arthur Evans had spent decades deciding what Minoan Crete ought to have looked like, then had his workmen build it, on the theory that a ruin without a roof was simply a ruin nobody could love.
The paved court in the foreground survives from the actual excavation, dry grass pushing up between stones that were laid down some three and a half thousand years before anyone thought to photograph them. Behind it the reconstructed upper story sits on the old foundations with the confidence of a building that knows it is partly guesswork, its ochre-trimmed windows a color scheme selected by an Edwardian archaeologist rather than a Minoan mason.
Visitors in this era rarely questioned where excavation ended and imagination began, and the camera did not care either way. It simply recorded a hillside outside Heraklion where one man's idea of the Bronze Age had become, for practical purposes, the Bronze Age itself.
Visually related — by likeness
The Reconstructed Palace of Knossos, Crete, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-C8EB6C. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/the-reconstructed-palace-of-knossos-crete-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026C8EB6C,
title = {The Reconstructed Palace of Knossos, Crete, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-C8EB6C},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/the-reconstructed-palace-of-knossos-crete-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - The Reconstructed Palace of Knossos, Crete, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-C8EB6C UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/the-reconstructed-palace-of-knossos-crete-1950s ER -
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