Obviously a visit to the Palace of Knossos and the treasures of the Archeological Museum at Heraklion was a must. I’m glad we visited them in that order, seeing first the context of the archeological haul before viewing the items themselves.

The Palace of Knossos was built in three phases first in the Neolithic Period in around 7000 BCE but later became a centre of  Minoan civilisation and culture. At its height this first urban area’s population reached around 18,000 before it was abandoned after a series of disasters by around 1100 BCE. Unearthed in 1878, excavation and restoration of the site began in the early 1900s, with controversial reconstructions spearheaded by Sir Arthur Evans. Commentators are often sceptical about the attempts at reconstruction, describing them as Evans’s flights of fancy but I find it difficult to visualise pictures and I was grateful for some of the reconstructions. We trod in the steps of visiting diplomats and politicians and merchants from thousands of years ago, and imagined sitting to watch a perfomance, or gladitorial spectacle perhaps – who knows? – in the small square amphitheatre. We saw the storage warehouses and the magnificent central staircase, and reflected on how the artisanal workshops were so close to the King’s apartments, as if he needed a pivotal input into the design and manufacture of ceremonial objects.

Sadly we were not permitted to enter the Queen’s Apartments, where the famous reconstruction of the Minoan dolphins lives, but we saw the original fragments in the museum later on, along with tools and votive offerings. It became clear from our visit to the impressive museum display that supplicants would offer models of painful limbs to the gods to ask for help in healing, as well as models of everyday implements and pithoi amphoras.

I was really impressed with displays of jewellery and axes and figurines. My favourite was the famous Bull’s Head Rhyton, a drinking vessel. The reconstructions of frescoes were impressive, but I remained a little unconvinced at how tiny fragments of fresco could be imagined by extrapolation as part of a whole wall painting. In the end the information overload was just too much. I think you need to spend ages here, going in and out of the display halls interspersing them with meals and snacks.

In the evening we went down to the little parade of pretty shops and restaurants at Plaka, where Victoria Hislop wrote that books and where we feasted on a magnificent grouper and then rubbed our eyes at the bill. I find it so odd that fish is quite so expensive on the Mediterranean island, but perhaps I’m naive. Is it a comfort that Fiona Bruce and Gorbachev were possibly ripped off in the same same manner? Not really. Perhaps, like the Knossos reconstruction, that’s mere speculation.