Gournia – the “Pompeii of Minoan Crete”

On a low hill above the sea, at the point where Crete is at its narrowest, lies Gournia (Γουρνιά) – one of the most revealing sites of Minoan civilisation and also one of the quietest. It is known as the “Pompeii of Crete”, and anyone who catches sight of the grey lines of walling on the slope from the coast road between Agios Nikolaos and Ierapetra will see at once why: here an entire town lies open to view. Its heyday falls in the Late Minoan I period, roughly 1550 to 1450 BC, and almost everything the visitor sees today dates from that time, when some sixty houses were home to an estimated 500 to 800 people. The site is about 19 kilometres east of Agios Nikolaos, just before the village of Pachia Ammos and immediately beside the road; the sea is only a few hundred metres to the north.

A town on the Isthmus of Ierapetra

The position was chosen with care. Gournia commands the northern end of the Isthmus of Ierapetra, the neck of land only a few kilometres wide across which goods could be carried from the Sea of Crete to the Libyan Sea without the need to sail round the eastern tip of the island. It occupies a small strip of coastal lowland, shut in by mountains to the east and north-east and by lower hills to the west, and in the Bronze Age a harbour lay at the mouth of a stream that once ran all year and is now dry. The oldest traces of human activity on the hill belong to the Early Minoan III period, around 2300 BC; more recent excavation has brought to light sherds and building remains that go back further still, to the earlier phases of the Early Minoan age, and even Neolithic use of a rock shelter nearby. From the Middle Minoan period (2000–1600 BC), when the settlement grew considerably, walls, plaster floors and earlier street lines survive, and towards the end of that era the palace was built on the summit. Around 1450 BC it and the surrounding town went up in flames – at the same time as the other Minoan centres of the island. About half a century later part of the hill was settled once more, now under Mycenaean influence, with a building of megaron type and a small shrine of its own looking out over the ruins; around 1200 BC the place was abandoned for good.

Two cobbled main streets run in a ring around the hill and are crossed by narrow side lanes, often stepped, so that blocks of houses are formed; seven such quarters have been uncovered, and the street system as a whole runs to more than half a kilometre. The excavated area covers about 1.7 hectares, though at its greatest extent the town may have spread over some four. It was unfortified. Its houses stood wall to wall, were of two storeys and were small – the larger ones measure barely five metres by five. The lower floor, built of rubble, served as store and workshop and could often be reached only by a wooden ladder from above, which is why many rooms have no doorway; people lived on the upper floor of mud brick, to which steps led directly from the lane. Beneath the paving ran a simple network of drainage channels.

In these houses the excavators found the workshops of bronze-casters, carpenters and potters, together with chisels, hammers, saws, fish hooks, loom weights and whole sets of clay vessels. Gournia seems to have been a town of craftsmen first and foremost: more than fifty working areas have been identified – for pottery, for stone vases and for bronze – along with a stack of eleven kilns built one over another and ingots of copper and tin, while most houses held so few storage jars that their occupants must have bartered their wares for food. The tools lay where they had last been used, witnesses to a sudden end. Its cause is still disputed. For a long time the eruption of the volcano of Santorini and a tidal wave that followed it were held responsible, and that explanation is still often repeated; most scholars, however, now place the eruption considerably earlier and, for the conflagration of about 1450 BC, think instead of earthquake or of armed violence.

Palace, court and shrine

On the highest point of the hill stands the palace, probably the seat of a local ruler and, compared with Knossos or Phaistos, a building on an almost domestic scale. It held a central hall, living quarters, rooms for feasting and storerooms; one room alone yielded more than seven hundred conical cups, laid down in two ceremonial deposits. Its west façade was nonetheless designed to impress, of dressed ashlar with setbacks, a central door and windows, while the north front was raised in massive boulders; the hall opened on to the court through a row in which round wooden columns alternated with square stone piers. To the south lies a rectangular open space of some 500 square metres which is taken to have been the market and place of assembly. An L-shaped flight of steps at its edge is interpreted as a modest “theatral” stair from which the inhabitants watched ritual performances. Close beside it lies a large pierced stone slab, understood as a sacrificial table – perhaps for the sacrifice of bulls – and a kernos, a stone with small hollows for offerings.

A little to the north of the palace, at the end of a short cul-de-sac of its own, stands a tiny rectangular shrine with a stone bench for the cult equipment. Here the Minoan snake goddess was worshipped: clay idols of the goddess with upraised arms were found, a three-legged table of offerings and so-called snake tubes, tubular stands decorated with snakes. What the town was called in the Bronze Age no one knows; the very fact that its name is lost gives the place its peculiar gravity. The finds – vessels, bronze tools, seals, cult objects – are now divided between several museums on the island, chief among them the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion; a share of the material from the first excavations also went to the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, which had supported the work.