It was mid afternoon when we hopped on the Line 2 bus to the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. I was a little worried that we would not be able to see much because of reduced operating time in mid-October. But lucky for us, we had enough time to go through the collections at a relatively easy pace.
We paid €16 per person for a non-guided tour.
The museum in general is very interesting. It houses artefacts collected from various archeological sites in Crete. There were pottery, ceramics, figurines of various shapes and sizes. There were frescoes from the Palace of Knossos, lots of jewellery. The only thing I didn’t appreciate was the vandalism made on the descriptive texts on the display mounts. Some of the letters, even fulls words, were either erased or chipped off. This added a bit of inconvenience to reads like Cholo and I who want to understand the things we see.
I was most excited about the Minoan Snake Goddess. We studied her a bit in college because of the technique used to make the figurine. As per Wikipedia, “The figurines are made of faience, a technique for glazing earthenware and other ceramic vessels by using a quartz paste. After firing, this produces bright colors and a lustrous sheen “. I was not expecting it to be very small, but mind you this figurine is a big deal in the archeological world.
I was surprised when I saw a small collection of ancient makeup in one of the display cases. Bing a makeup artist, this is a huge thing for me to see. this meant that Minoans painted their faces! I’m not going to discuss these things here because I am going to blog about that in my makeup blog site, tortorre.me.
I especially enjoyed the collection of Greek sculptures at one of the rooms we last entered before we exited the building.
We exited the museum right about dinner time. We found our way to the center of town and managed to find a small Chinese Rice Bowl fast food restaurant. I love rice and it is important that I have some because I suffer from rice withdrawal if I can’t have any! *laughs*.
Heraklion high street is easy to navigate. There were lots of shops and restaurants to choose from. We made our way to the old venetian port. Although it was a dark, we can see that the port and the old breakwater is a favorite jogging/waking spot by locals. We made it as far as the Rocca a Mare Fortress – we wanted to go all the way to the lighthouse at the very end, but that would entail a 30 minute walk just to get to it.
We slowly made our way back to the bus stop near the Archeological museum. We were to leave for Chania in the morning.
TOR Guide 