Helen's Daughter

But wait, you say, how can you do a doll when you don’t know what the bottom looks like?

In fact, the Dancing Girl fresco in the so-called Queen’s Megaron also wears the orange jacket, which makes me wonder whether the orange jacket/blue skirt combination might have been what the priestesses at Knossos wore.

View from Akrotiri, the Minoan Pompeii.  In ancient times, the door and window frames would have been wood fitted together with wooden pegs; today, they are concrete, modeled after casts taken when archaeologists pumped plaster into voids in the compacted ash where organic material had deteriorated.

Minoan architecture made such liberal use of wooden tie beams, uprights, pillars, and door and window frames that some experts believe this practice contributed to the deforestation of Crete.  One reason the Minoans might have done this was that the wood construction helped reinforce buildings against seismic stresses.

As you can see, though, the Minoans managed some rather generous windows, when most contemporary windows elsewhere were small and narrow.  The people of Akrotiri must have enjoyed great natural light and views.

Minoan houses had stone foundations, and the visible sections of the ground floor walls would have been dressed with stone.  While the framework was wood, the upper stories were probably mud brick.  The Minoans used lime plaster to cover the walls and provide a smooth white surface for decoration, and they often plastered the floor as well.  In wealthier establishments, the floor might be bordered with flagstones, and with soft gypsum in the center.  Sometimes the floors were painted with spirals, colored rectangles, and aquatic life; the famous Dolphin Sanctuary fresco at Knossos might have been a floor decoration fallen from the level above.

Evidence from Akrotiri and Knossos indicates that the Minoans also utilized sliding wooden pier and partition doors, meaning the doors could be slid back to provide access and greater light, or closed to seal off a space for rituals, or simply to keep in the heat during the winter.


 

An iconic fresco, the mysterious young Prince of the Lilies graces Cretan postcards and tourist tchotchkes.  Little do the tourists who flock to Knossos each year by the thousands know that the fresco is a fake.  Fake, that is, in that it was reconstructed three fresco fragments that might not even be related to each other.  In the image below, you can see that only the crown, torso, and part of the left leg are original fresco fragments; the rest is a fanciful modern reconstruction.

The Minoans followed Egyptian standards in coloring--that is, they used brown or Indian red for male skin, and white for female.  What is peculiar about the Prince of the Lilies is that his skin is white.  So the original fresco might have depicted a girl rather than a youth.

The fresco you see in the Corridor of Procession when you visit Knossos, and on postcards and other trinkets, is a reproduction; the original is housed in the nearby Heraklion Archaeological Museum.

A reconstruction of what the Knossos Throne Room might have looked like 3,200 years ago.