Sir Arthur Evans and Minoan Crete

We shall now look at the final years of Evans at Knossos. The principal argument will be that he was determined to conserve the ruins because he felt the need to preserve the Minoan aesthetic vision which he considered truly unique in the entire history of mankind; moreover he was motivated to do so because of the onslaught of modernism to which he could not entirely relate. He sensed that his own civilization (the nineteenth century) was giving way to another era. The pessimism which he felt in his older age about the future of Europe is a backdrop that we must keep in mind.

Given the above, it is an irony of fate that many people among the intellectual and artistic elite of Europe got exactly the opposite idea of what he intended to convey; rather than admiring Minoan civilization for its high standards and uniqueness they considered the restored Palace as exotic, ugly or decadent. Some did not realize the basis for the reconstructed features and considered them scientific fantasy. At the same time, modernism questioned the aesthetic principles of the restorations (which by the way are not modernistic).

Let us begin with the 1920s when a German architectural historian by the name of Fritz Krischen visited Knossos. Impressed by the ruins, he decided to design works of art representing the people in the Palace.¹ One of his lithographs was inspired by a Minoan vessel from the mansion of Hagia Triada, the so-called Chieftain's Cup (Figure 28).² Krischen depicts the two men of the ancient work as exotic officers standing in front of the Palace. Their muscular half-naked bodies and heavy facial features give them a foreign look and they remind of paintings about the tropics, such as, for example, Gauguin's Polynesian scenes. Evans, however, imagined the same men very differently; in his mind they were members of a sophisticated European court, as may be inferred from what he writes about the original scene on the Minoan cup.

The young Minoan Prince is shown outside the gate of his residence here indicated by the pillar of rectangular blocks behind him, giving orders to an officer of his guard. Though in this case there seems to have been nothing more on his head than a band or a simple diadem, the superior rank of a youthful chieftain is shown not only by his greater stature but by the decoration that he wears around his neck and arms. In addition to the double ring or torque around his neck that he shares with his subordinate, there hangs from his shoulders across his chest a jewelled collar which, like the broad armlets and bracelets, have the appearance of having been set with medallions.³

Figure 28 Chieftain's cup, sketch made by the German artist F. Krischen in Ein Festtag am Hofe de Minos (1921).

The meticulous description of the jewellery is not just a sample of Evans's ability to detect artistic detail; it additionally reveals his belief that the figures are members of a highly civilized and hierarchical court society where each piece of jewellery is a carefully crafted insignium dignitatis.

The same discrepancy between Evans and Krischen applies to females. The German artist's women are exotic as we may infer from an etching of Minoan ladies bathing in the queen's quarters of the Palace (Figure 29a). They are plump and naked, with pretty pouting faces. They mutually anoint each other, an act which suggests sensuality. Evans would not have liked these images had he seen them; for, as he often remarked, nude figures were systematically avoided in Minoan art, and its people were more restrained in matters of sexual sensuality than their Near Eastern neighbours. A rendition such as Krischen's was out of tune with the true spirit of Minoan society. His own version, executed by Gilliéron fils for the frontispiece of Palace of Minos III, is entirely different (Figure 29b). The two ladies there are fully clothed and their elegant dresses, despite deep décolletages, discreetly cover the breasts with a diaphanous gauze, a practice that is paralleled in Elizabethan costume. Indeed, a portrait of Elizabeth I shows her with exposed breasts (Figure 29c).⁴ Note also that the ladies in the painting by Gilliéron wear gloves: again we note a similarity between Minoan and European female dress. Evans had consulted the art historian of the Ashmolean Museum and concluded that Minoan ladies wore close-fitting bodices that were sometimes covered by light linen cloth. The full flounces of the skirt were ornamented by diverse pieces of fabric, and the whole costume was enhanced by ribbons, garlands and beads.⁵ Again, the comparisons were closest to the dress of European court:

The sleeves are puffed and the constricted girdles and flounced skirts equally recall quite modern fashions. A narrow band appears above the chest, which suggests a diaphanous chemise, but the nipples of the breasts indicated beneath these […] give a décolleté effect. A curiously artificial atmosphere of social life pervades these highly polite groups of Court ladies.⁶

Figure 29a–c Contrasting visions of Minoan civilization: (a) Krischen's sensual view of Minoan women. F. Krischen, Ein Festtag am Hofe de Minos (1921). (b) Evans's version of Minoan women as civilized court-ladies in the Queen's Hall. Evans PM III, frontispiece. (c) Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth I, Hatfield House.

In short, the aforementioned German artist of the interwar period, as well as other artists inspired by Minoan art, imagined the Cretans inhabiting an exotic and sensual world, whereas Evans had them dwell in a sophisticated (he called it artificial) court society. In the gestures of the ladies on the paintings he detected pointed and lively gestures, but never violent, never over-passing the limits of ‘what is permissible in good society’.⁷

Consider how he discusses a mural found just north of the central court, the so-called Grand Stand Fresco. The women in this painting either stand or are seated among the Palace pillars. Evans senses what kinds of conversation those ladies had and brings the scene to life:

the latter [lady] points her statement by thrusting forward her right arm so as almost to lay her palm on the other's lap, while her confidante raises hers in amazement. ‘You don't say so!’ – the sense of the words can be supplied, though we may never decipher the language.⁸

Such a society, spontaneous and artificial, sophisticated and yet close to nature, was hard to parallel.⁹ And this combination is what made it unique in Evans's eyes and is why he attempted to capture it with his architectural restorations. The Palace is a building open to sunlight, nature and colour. It incorporates gardens and vivacious paintings, and yet it is also solemn and imposing. It is conspicuous in the landscape and yet it blends within it. This vision of Minoan aesthetics could not have been made concrete except by a man who had thought deeply about it. And yet, it must be stressed again and again that almost every detail was based on evidence.

We know that his efforts were not always appreciated. When the English writer Evelyn Waugh visited Knossos in 1931, he felt aversion rather than awe, especially when he entered the room of the throne, which he describes as a place of oppressive wickedness.

This squat little throne, set on a landing where the paths of the palace intersect; it is not the seat of a law-giver nor a divan for the recreation of a soldier; here an ageing despot might crouch and have borne to him, along the walls of a whispering gallery, barely audible intimations of his own murder.¹⁰

This example (and one could find many more) is enough to illustrate the gap that separated Evans from the artistic public he tried to reach. Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of the popularization of ideas.

Turning now to the question of whether the restorations have a scientific basis, we must distinguish between two phases. The first took place before World War I, between 1901 and 1906, and was driven by the concern to conserve what was found intact.¹¹ We have Evans's own testimony to explain what motivated him to restore the Palace. It had been his extremely good fortune, he wrote, to have come across such a curious and unexampled phenomenon: the upper levels of the Palace had been found completely preserved because they had not been destroyed by any physical disaster, nor had they been carried away by floods. It was simply the case that the wooden beams that once supported the upper floors had eventually rotted away, and the floors had collapsed as a result. It was as if the levels of a doll's house had been compressed into one compact mass. In the East Wing at least, the picture was complete. A dilemma presented itself then: should he allow rain and wind to erode the remains? Should he leave the ruins to time and chance? Should he remove the floors, layer by layer, and thus destroy them? Or should he rebury the site? He decided that the only way to preserve the remains of the upper floors was to re-erect the rotten columns and the beams of the roof and replace them with wood and to preserve the entire complex. Thanks to his excellent architects, Theodore Fyfe and Christian Doll, who meticulously studied the architecture and proposed solutions, he was able to accomplish the task. Doll first experimented with wood (since the latter was the original material), but when he realized that it did not stand up to Cretan weather, he experimented with iron. Yet that too was incompatible with the Cretan climate since it disintegrated through corrosion after the first few seasons.¹² It was only after World War I that Evans saw the advantage of ferro-concrete buildings and decided that this material was the most enduring.

In the interwar period, between 1925 and 1931, Evans tried to do more than just conserve, since greater possibilities were furnished by ferro-concrete. The architect during this phase was the Briton of Dutch origin Piet de Jong.

The restorations of this period are bolder. They include paintings and are geared towards creating an overall impression of Minoan life, which is not to say that they are not scientifically based. For example, it is seldom admitted that cement was used mainly for the horizontal elements of the roofs and not for the erection of vertical walls, which were built by stone according to the original conception of Minoan architecture.¹³ The result was a palace that was accessible to the public and which made Minoan civilization comprehensible even to the uninitiated. Another aim was to highlight the beauty of Minoan art. The contrast between the rejection of nature in modernist visual arts and its exuberance in Knossian murals must have struck Evans. Hilda Pendlebury, the wife of John Pendlebury, the curator of Knossos, wrote to her father-in-law in the spring of 1929:

Sir Arthur took us over to the site which has altered enormously since last year as more excavations have been done in some places and reconstructions in others. It is really becoming a habitable place and I think it is a good thing that the reconstructions should be done on the site so as to give people a clear idea of what a Minoan palace was.

I do think Sir Arthur ought to live there in the end.¹⁴

We have another eyewitness of the restoration works of 1929. As a recently appointed Ephor of Antiquities of Crete, Spyridon Marinatos supervised the restorations as a representative of the Greek authorities and wrote reports about them to the Ministry of Education and Culture in Athens. He lists all the works: the roofing over of the west magazines, the northern Lustral Basin, the erection of the walls of the South Propylon, the building of a storehouse near the House of Chancel Screen, the roofing over of the Middle Minoan magazines near the ‘School Room’ and the Room of the Throne. He reports that Emile Gilliéron had been painting fresco replicas in the Queen's Megaron and Grand Staircase (Figure 30).¹⁵ At that time the young Marinatos was not entirely convinced that all these restorations were absolutely necessary and writes a private report to his ministry in Athens:

As regards my personal opinion, I have difficulties expressing it responsibly without deeper knowledge which at present I do not possess. Nor do I have the time at present to engage in deeper study of the matter. But I can state that I am absolutely in favour of the building restorations which have the advantage of securing the antiquities lying underneath. On the other hand, it is unfortunately not to be doubted that, on many points, Mr Evans takes liberties beyond what is desirable. And it must be admitted that the painted decorations are motivated more by a desire for show than by scientific necessity. In both his restorations and his writings, Evans takes into account the general public rather than the researcher. Thus, there is no scientific criterion for the restorations of doors and window openings and placement of certain murals.¹⁶ All this creates a fanciful impression of the ruins but certainly misleads the researcher.¹⁷

Figure 30 Spyridon Marinatos, 1932, in front of the freshly painted shields of the East Hall. In the beginning he was sceptical of the restorations but then converted to Evans's views.

In a separate letter he requests that the Director of the Archaeological Service, Professor Konstantine Kourouniotis, visit the site himself because he (Marinatos) could not take the entire responsibility on his own shoulders.¹⁸

Thus, the opinion that Evans over-restored was shared by experts and non-experts alike and is certainly the view that has prevailed in our days as the communis opinio. And yet, Evans had also his defenders. Marinatos himself turned fully around when he became more familiar with the Palace and when he had a chance more fully to study the bases of the restorations. For when he wrote the report cited above, the Greek ephor was unaware of Evans's full arguments, which were published only later in the third volume of The Palace of Minos (1930). Once the detailed plans of the Queen's Quarters were made available, Marinatos understood the scientific bases for the restorations. He realized why the doors and windows were placed exactly where they had been; only careful study enabled the young archaeologist to appreciate Evans's brilliance and de Jong's accuracy.

Leaving the divided opinions aside for the moment, we return to the question posed at the beginning, namely why Evans felt the need to initiate the second phase of restorations and reify his vision of the high civilization he had unearthed. In 1925 Evans was 74 years of age; by 1931 he was 80. On the aesthetic level, modernism signalled a new age. On the political level, European instability could hardly go unnoticed. Did Evans attempt to rescue Knossos from the incertitude of time and chance? This, in any case, is what he wrote in the last volume of The Palace of Minos.

It seemed a duty of the excavator to preserve, wherever possible, the history of the building by replacing in situ – even when it entailed some reconstitution of the walls – replicas of the fresco designs as completed from the existing fragments.¹⁹

That World War I affected his perception of history and opened his eyes to the fragility of civilizations may be inferred indirectly from the references he makes to the end of the golden age in the last volume of Palace of Minos; I suspect he meant also his own.²⁰ We also know that when his field director, Duncan Mackenzie, visited the site after the end of the war, he found it in very bad shape: weeds covered many of the ruins while the place had turned into a sanctuary for goats to graze freely.²¹ What Evans could not have foreseen is that a series of natural disasters was about to occur during the interwar period and that his restoration plan saved the ruins from destruction.

In the summer of 1926, Evans experienced the first major earthquake at Knossos, which shook the entire Mediterranean, reaching as far as India. Evans described the drama of the incident as follows.

On June 26 of that year, at 9.45 in the evening of a calm, warm day the shocks began. They caught me reading in a basement room of the head-quarter house – the Villa Ariadne – and, trusting to the exceptional strength of the fabric, I decided to see the earthquake through from within. Perhaps I had hardly realized the full awesomeness of the experience, though my confidence in the strength of the building material proved justified, since it did not suffer more than slight cracks.

But it creaked and groaned, heaved and rocked from side to side, as if the whole might collapse. A dull sound rose from the ground like the muffled roar of an angry bull: our single bell rang, while, through the open window, came the more distant jangling of the chimes of the Candia Cathedral, the belfries as well as the dome and cupolas of which were badly damaged. As the quickly repeated shocks produced their cumulative effects, the crashing of the roofs of the two small houses outside the garden gate made itself audible, mingled with women's shrieks and the cries of some small children, who however were happily rescued.²²

Eyewitnesses reported that once the earth stopped trembling, Evans emerged calm from the Villa Ariadne surrounded by a cloud of dust.²³ He was greatly relieved to see that the Palace had suffered no damages and considered it a miraculous coincidence that he had finished the works just in time; he determined to do more. In a paper given at the Society of Antiquaries a few months after the event, he explained to the audience the advantages of ferro-concrete as earthquake-proof material and one that endured even physical catastrophes of great magnitude.²⁴

On 14 February 1930, the second major earthquake took place causing further damage to the town as well as to the archaeological museum at Herakleion. We have the testimonies of Marinatos on the severity of the situation. The museum had been already weakened during the first quake of 1926, and now the new tremor destabilized it further, turning it into a veritable death-trap for visitors and antiquities alike. The Greek ephor realized at that moment that Evans's mission had been the preservation of this ancient civilization for posterity and decided to join him with all his forces. The imminent collapse of the museum alerted him to the possibility that the treasures of Minoan civilization were about to perish and his fears increased when more tremors occurred during the next two months. He wrote to the ministry in Athens on March 8, 1930:

I have the honour to report that the day before yesterday, Thursday, another strong earthquake occurred, around 11:30AM, which resulted in the destruction of two more vases. The museum was full of visitors then and the ensuing panic among the guards and the public almost resulted in damages even more severe than what has hitherto been suffered. Luckily I happened to be on the entrance stairway and from the position where I stood I tried to calm the crowds down by shouting and forbidding the guards to come down the stairs and flee the building. Once the danger was over, I closed the museum for the day. […] In general, I must report the sad fact that this museum is a complete wreck and we hardly have time to repair one damage before the next one occurs.²⁵

Evans was in England at the time but was informed directly by Marinatos about the state of affairs. Something had to be done also about the Throne Room at Knossos because it had been damaged and a more solid and permanent roof was necessary. All Marinatos could do at the time was to shelter it provisionally and wait for Evans to come personally and propose a better solution. Evans writes back to Marinatos on 3 April 1930:

I was glad to hear that you have not suffered more from the Earthquake, also that you are taking steps to secure an Earthquake-proof wing. That was promised by the Government after the 1926 earthquake but never executed. Now I have got through my proofs of Vol. III I hope to hasten to Crete so I shall have an opportunity of talking over these things with you personally. I want to have the Room of the Throne at Knossos better roofed over – together with Antechamber, the Gypsum slabs of which are suffering greatly from exposure to dampness. M. de Jong has gone ahead to prepare this.²⁶

The letter shows that Evans's intention at the time he wrote the letter was simply to cover the Throne Room better. However, when he came to Crete and reflected upon the situation, he decided that a solitary room with a ferro-concrete roof would look aesthetically out of place.²⁷ He consulted with de Jong about the possibility of constructing an upper storey and they decided to do so. Their reasons were four. First, a second storey offered permanent protection to the Room of the Throne. Second, it enhanced the aesthetic impression of the West Wing, integrating it with the rest of the Palace. Third, the upper storey gave the possibility to the visitor to enjoy vistas of the environs of the Palace. Fourth, it enabled Evans to install a gallery and exhibit there the best of Minoan fresco replicas.

All this must be viewed in connection with the imminent danger of earthquakes that was hanging over the archaeologists' heads in 1930–1. If the precious murals (which were stored in the crumbling Herakleion Museum) were to be damaged in the event of another earthquake (which in fact happened), the gallery would have preserved at least the replicas of brilliant Minoan paintings.

There have been objections to the procedures, and some of them are no doubt well stated.²⁸ And yet it must be noted that the upper floor was not entirely conjectural. Its presence was justified by the existence of the service staircase next to the Room of the Throne, as well as by objects fallen into the Lustral Basin.²⁹ The positions of the pier-and-door constructions of the upper storey were not arbitrarily decided but concluded on the basis of the weight-bearing pillars or the solid walls of the ground floor. In other words, a student of Minoan architecture realizes that Evans's scheme entails predictable plans and that the latter follow consistent rules and templates.³⁰

When the restoration of the Throne Room was complete, murals of griffins against a landscape of reeds were placed on the walls executed by Gilliéron fils. It has already been mentioned above that visitors kept flocking in to look at the miraculous Palace and the throne of its king and that their reactions were mixed. Once more Evans found himself to be an object of controversy rather than admiration. Unfortunately, most of the travellers arrived during a cruise and spent just an hour or two in the Palace.

In 1933, the Greek poet Kostas Ouranis arrived in Crete on a cruise ship and visited Knossos. The Palace was a priority, but Ouranis was so disappointed with what he saw that he published a negative piece about his impressions in an Athenian newspaper. How exaggerated the importance of Knossos and its ruins had been, he wrote, and how little the Palace had lived up to his expectations! When his ship docked in the harbour of Herakleion he and his fellow French tourists were most eager to see that great marvel of Minoan civilization and therefore skipped all other sites of historical importance, heading directly to Knossos. However, disappointment began right away: the road was dusty, the landscape barren and uninviting, the day dark and cloudy. When the party arrived, Ouranis realized to his horror that not a single room was ‘genuine’ and that everything seemed to be the product of the unbridled fantasy of the archaeologists. The stone throne of Minos was a crude and narrow seat which a French lady, his fellow traveller, named unworthy of her entrance parlour! The bathtub of the Queen was nothing but a small stone trough! ‘With or without Evans's restorations, the Palace of Knossos does not speak to the soul of the visitor’.³¹

When Marinatos read this piece, he was moved to anger and wrote a response in another Athenian newspaper defending Evans's restorations, his scientific method and his vision of a truly brilliant civilization.³² Marinatos did not question the subjective judgement of the poet (everybody was entitled to their own opinion), but he was upset that the latter expressed his uninformed views with such confidence. A poet was not trained to be an archaeologist and did not understand on what bases the restorations had been made. Perhaps, wrote Marinatos, Mr Ouranis was moody that day, bothered by the wet and dark weather; perhaps he found no pleasure in the visit – this was his right and privilege. However, pronouncing a scientific judgement on the work of a man who had spent his entire life thinking about details and calling Evans's work unbridled fantasy was irresponsible. Had he studied the architectural evidence? On what kind of expert knowledge did he base this verdict? Worst of all: why had he not sought the guidance of an archaeologist as he was visiting the site? Marinatos was equally bothered by Ouranis's doubts about the quality of Minoan civilization. Did he not observe its complex drainage system unsurpassed in antiquity until Roman times? Was not exceptional cleanliness evident from the presence of water-troughs, bathtubs and hydraulic installations throughout the Palace and the town? Was not the Palace built by architects who had adjusted their design to the physical beauty of the Cretan landscape? The Throne Room had appeared humble and dark to him because he had looked at it through his own moody dark goggles. Beauty had to be felt inside the heart before the mind.³³

In another newspaper article, Marinatos further defended Evans's restorations when he had the occasion to compare them with the minimalistic restorations of the Italian archaeologists at the Palace of Phaistos. He found the latter adequate, but in some respects inferior to those of Knossos. It is true, he wrote, that at Knossos sometimes the restorations went beyond what was necessary. Yet, nothing at Knossos was done without some reason. There was no ideal solution anyway. In the case of Phaistos, problems arose due to the minimalist intervention of the architects. For example, they left the exquisite floors and the magazines in the West Wing unprotected from the weather. One could have sheltered them with a simple roof, of course, but then the aesthetic impression would be distorted.³⁴

It is not known how much Evans was aware of these debates, but we may suspect that he knew of them because his sister mentions that around this time he was conscious of a sense of failure.

Georg Karo, however, was and remained one of his most ardent defenders, and this is how he explained Evans's decision to restore. Evans had realized already in 1901 that some of the materials of the Palace, especially gypsum and alabaster, were particularly vulnerable to the Cretan climate and needed immediate conservation; indeed, conservation was the key behind his entire project. Only a few people knew as well as I, Karo writes, that each phase of the excavation brought a new headache and that Evans had constantly to devise ingenious solutions, always relying on the most expert and reliable collaborators. It was a lucky coincidence that the site had fallen into the hands of a man of such scientific expertise and unbounded personal generosity, a man who was able to dedicate both his life and fortune to Knossos. Karo believed that Evans had not only the necessary scholarly insight but also the boldness to execute the plan. Additionally, he had the necessary stability of character to maintain the same collaborators for decades and thus keep the project consistent.³⁵

Given the above, one understands why Knossos is considered so controversial today but one also may wonder if people today realize how much thought and study was put into the project. Such knowledge may easily get lost, and for this reason the testimony of people who witnessed the process is important.

A postscript must be added about the fate of the Herakleion Museum.³⁶ Its situation was made worse when a third earthquake struck Crete in 1935. It was most severe, and because it occurred during the early hours of the day, it resulted in several human victims. The first report published in The Times gave the human casualties as three, but later the numbers rose to six dead and 60 injured. More than 200 houses collapsed, and some 500 were at the point of so doing. Tents were sent from Athens to shelter people exposed to the heavy rain that followed the earthquake.³⁷ The museum was now at the point of collapse, and Evans heard the bad news from his curator at Knossos, R. W. Hutchinson. He immediately sent a note to The Times, and the newspaper reported to its public:

Sir Arthur Evans informs us that the curator of the museum at Knossos has advised him that the Minoan Palace and the British headquarters house, the Villa Ariadne, and the hostel are safe. The curator makes no mention of the museum, in which, according to a message from Athens, some damage had been done by a fall of plaster due to the earthquake.³⁸

Marinatos's assessment of the situation was more pessimistic, as may be seen from a letter he writes to his Dutch friend, Mme Suzanne Goekoop.

We have suffered very much from the earthquake. I am now fully occupied with reparations which will last a long time still. The antiquities have suffered enough, although not as much as it appeared at first. In any case we have much to reconstitute and re-assemble.³⁹

Evans too became anxious that the museum would collapse but trusted that ‘the energetic ephor of Crete’, Marinatos, would do his best.⁴⁰ The latter informed him that the old building would be soon demolished but that his efforts to build a new museum had met with the stubborn resistance of local people. He was losing patience, he confided to Evans, and was almost ready to resign from his post. One of the leaders in the resistance was the old pottery-restorer of the Herakleion Museum, Manolis Salustros, a man whom Evans knew personally because he had worked at Knossos in earlier years. It is not clear why Salustros resisted the demolition of the old building with such vigour; apparently he had some issues with Marinatos which the latter discloses to Evans:

The new Museum has not yet found its beginning, as Mr. Salustros, who is now not more [sic] in the service, has caused in the newspapers and in the coffee-houses a terrible reaction. He is pretending that the old Museum must not be demolished. As it is impossible to found [sic] another place, he tells to built [sic] the new Museum out of town. He has excited much people [sic] but I have too, my partisans and a mortal duel is being [fought] now in the Ministry. I have mentioned that I shall go out of Crete, better, than to undertake the danger of the transport of the museum far away from its actual place. I think that this week we shall begin to put down the great flight of the old building, that is already free from cases. It has not been possible to go to Kephallonia excavation this year. The new museum absorbs all my time and I have put aside every other work.⁴¹

Marinatos struggles with his English in this letter but manages to convey the intensity of his emotions and his frustration. He expresses the same view of despair in a local Cretan newspaper where he attempts to rally the emotional support of the local public for the erection of the new building. The state of affairs is indeed lamentable, he says in an interview. Everything conspires against the materialization of the new museum and every time an agreement on a particular plan is reached, something or someone stops it: e.g. financial crises, civil unrest, changes of government, etc. The work is postponed for the indefinite future while irresponsible people propose solutions concocted in five minutes in the coffeehouses. The most urgent matter was this: the inestimably precious treasures of European civilization were stored in a deadly trap and they had to be rescued immediately.⁴²

Evans, now at the age of 85, felt he was running out of time and that something needed to be done, but he was unable to interfere. On 12 December 1935, however, he received the good news from Marinatos that the battle had been won and that the question of the new museum had happily ended. Half of the old building had already been demolished, and Marinatos hoped that by April a new flight of stairs would be in place. He adds with sadness in his letter to Evans:

But the unexampled demagoguery of Mister Salustros and his similars has caused to me much trouble. I have been called a not indigenous (anemozoxaris in their own dialect) and I have been invited by a newspaper to go away from Crete. I am sorry that I am obliged to abuse still of their hospitality!⁴³

Evans had himself experienced local rivalries in the past when he had a conflict with the rich Herakleiote merchant Minos Kalokairinos; he was the first man to have dug the Palace and resented Evans's intrusion into local affairs.⁴⁴ Now Evans calmed Marinatos down and wrote back: ‘I am sorry to hear that you have had this trouble with Salustros but I hope that by now you have really been able to set to work’.⁴⁵

In the end, everything went well. The necessary money for the new museum was supplemented by private donors, two bankers from the island of Kephallonia named Spyridon and Dionysios Loverdos. The architect was the prize-winner Patroklos Karantinos, who also came from the island of Kephallonia.⁴⁶ The new building was modernist and lacked all the embellishments and grandeur of the old one, but it was practical and functional. Karantinos also made provisions for underground casements designed for the protection of antiquities from earthquakes. As it turned out, these casements saved the antiquities during the war.

The museum opened officially on 16 February 1939, exactly four years after the earthquake of 1935 and just before the outbreak of World War II.⁴⁷ The efforts of Evans and Marinatos to preserve Minoan civilization must be regarded as parallel since they both believed that this culture was one of the most precious ever to have been produced in human history. Nowhere does Evans state this more clearly than in the preface he wrote for John Pendlebury's guide on the Palace in 1933:

It may be confidently said indeed, that no equal plot of Earth's surface has been productive in such various directions of so many unique records bearing on our own culture. Not only have we here the first evidences of an advanced linear script, but architecture is already fully developed on novel lines, and with a no less original form in fresco decoration carried to great perfection, while masterpieces of sculpture and moulding have come to light […] which for instantaneous spirit and truth to natural forms have in their own line never been surpassed.⁴⁸

As has been mentioned before, Evans's goal was to make known the beauty and sophistication of the ancient culture of Crete to the general public. His decision must be viewed against the backdrop of the anxiety, financial poverty and aesthetic innovation of the interwar years as the nineteenth century was giving way to a new order: revolutionary aesthetics and uncertain values. This anxiety was communicated by expressionist artists as well as by the bolder cubist painters, such as Pablo Picasso. It was also represented in Weimar cinema, in the films of Georg Pabst and Fritz Lang, notably in Metropolis, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and M.

Evans undoubtedly sensed the insecurity and anxiety of the interwar years and found great solace in another age and another type of beauty. His restorations will ever be contested, and whatever position one takes, a counter-argument will easily be produced. And yet time has shown that he was both insightful and wise. Not only did the Palace survive three major earthquakes, but thanks to its solid walls it endured World War II without major damages. As for the museum, it was hit three times by the explosives dropped by the planes of the German forces in 1941. However, the ancient objects of Minoan civilization were hidden in the casements of its solid basement and were therefore saved.⁴⁹ It was not time and chance that preserved these antiquities but the foresight of men who understood the fragility of civilization and took measures to prevent its decay.