Houses at the north east corner of Gournia.

The Late Minoan town of Gournia was excavated by Harriet Boyd in the first years of the 20th century. It is one of the few Minoan towns to have been fully excavated. The original name of the settlement is not known and its present name comes from the hollow vessels found all over the site, many of which can still be seen at the entrances to the rooms. Gournia lies on a small hill, a few hundred metres from the sea in the Gulf of Mirabello, close to the north end of the Ierapetra isthmus.

A Gourni (plural Gournia) after which the town received its modern name.

Although the site had been occupied since Early Minoan times and there were signs of occupation in the early part of the Middle Minoan period, serious building first took place on the site in the Middle Minoan III or Late Minoan I period, when a small palace was built on the top of the hill. This was destroyed, along with the town, in the Late Minoan IB period at the same time as the destrucion of the other palaces. Although the palace at Gournia is small, its features imitated those of the larger palaces of Minoan Crete.

The Palace

The palace building measured 50 metres by 37 metres and faced south across the courtyard, which was approximately 40 metres by 15 metres.

The West facade had storerooms behind and rooms above as was traditional in the design of Minoan palaces. The palace also contained a lustral basin and light well. There were three entrances to the palace, from the south, west and northeast. In the courtyard, which was placed outside the palace because the palace was so small, there is what might be a sacrificial stone. Holes carved in the stone may have enabled a table to be slotted in, on which the animal to be sacrificed was tied. Another hole may have been for fixing a religious symbol, for example a double axe.

The small theatral area

To the north of the palace, and separate from it, a small civic shrine was found, dating to the LM I period. This small shrine was 3 metres by 4 metres and had a ledge on the south side for the placing of cult objects. In the shrine, the finds themselves dated from a much later period and included idols of a goddess with raised arms and a clay vessel with handles on either side in the form of snakes and a relief of horns of consecration.

Steps lead up through the industrial town to the Palace
area at the top of the hill.

The palace did not survive long and was destroyed by an earthquake. In Late Minion IA it was turned into workers' accommodation and an industrial settlement developed, growing out from the centre. Covering an area of 25,000 square metres, it can be divided into seven separate quarters. Two roads encircled the lower and upper parts of the town, joined together by steps.

Flat stone probably used for blood sacrifice. A table would have been inserted in the holes,
and an animal sacrificed on the table.

The numerous houses are small and tightly packed together. Many of the surviving rooms were most likely basements used for storage and entry to the houses would, in many cases, have been by steps leading up from the street. Some of these steps can still be seen. Other houses were entered directly at street level and large threshold stones can still be seen at the entrance to many of these houses. Access to the basements would have been down wooden stairs, through a trapdoor from inside the houses.

An idea of what Minoan houses looked like can be gained from the ivory and faience plaques discovered in the East wing of Knossos.

The south-east part of the town.

These plaques show what houses in the the town of Knossos looked like in the 17th century BCE.

On the roof there was a small room. This may have been used for sleeping in during the hot summer months. The rooms on the first floor had windows, but those on the ground floor did not, although some of them had doors on the ground floor. It may be that windows on the ground floor were avoided for simple reasons of security -- to avoid burglary.

Storage area set into the wall. This feature can still be seen in some Cretan houses, built
during the last couple of hundred years.

The houses were built around a wooden frame -- wooden beams ran horizontally and were linked to upright beams. The most likely reason for the use of these beams was as protection against earthquake damage.

Among the finds on the site are potters' wheels, a carpenter's workshop complete with saws and other tools, a coppersmith's forge and an oil press. The estimated population of the town was 4,000.

The site is open to the public and a good view of the whole of the east part of the the town can be had from the main Agios Nikolaos-Siteia road.

View of the east side of the town of Gournia. The large version of this photo looks much better