Sunday and Monday!

Well, three weeks have gone now and that puts us about halfway through this first dig. Today's will be a double day post, as I was too tired to get a good one together for yesterday and we did quite a lot. Sunday was a day well spent though. Brett and I pooled funds to rent a car with Angela, Alexis and Joey. We ended up touring through the east side of the island. We visited Petras, Kato Zakros and Palaikastro. 

Petra's is a site with a little Minoan palace and a couple houses. The entrance has a fabulous Venetian tower though:

And a bunch of interesting architecture, of various sorts. This is their palace, with a nice ashlar masonry front. A bunch of archives were found here too:

After that it was off to Kato Zakros, which is a site I rather like. It too has a palace, a bigger one than Petras, and is most famed in archaeology for a bunch of beautiful stone vases found there.  

It's got a lot of interesting thingies. Which are debated about as being cisterns or baths or pools or storage areas... But today they're also turtle ponds ^^

There are many interesting bits and bobs and I took a bunch of pictures, but some of the highlights were the remnants of a kiln for pottery:

On the downhill side was a chamber where the fire was built and then the heat would rise through these flues to bake the pottery in an upper chamber. That chamber then had to be destroyed to retrieve the finished pieces.

There's also a lot of interesting stonework, such as this monumental stairway, partially reconstructed:

 

And fabulous roads and stairways you can stroll along, just like someone was doing thousands of years ago. I love it!

And then we headed back to the car through this awesome grapey trellis path.

Next we packed up and made it to Palaikastro, which is an interesting Minoan settlement but doesn't have a palace (yet). It is probably most famous for this complex, where an amazingly beautiful ivory statue was recovered from a sacred area of some sort.

It also has some beautiful purple schist pavers, which are rather unique and were imported to the site, which says a lot for their wealth and connections.

And there are, of course, more roads to trot along.

 

But it was a fun day all in all.

Monday was a day of work and quiet relaxation, while we finish recovering from the weekend. We're off soon to make pasta and have dinner on the roof so we can watch the ocean and the sunset. Hope all is well at home!