Delta Force CYA, Operation: Cretan Lightning

Or, the part where Caroline and Bus D/Delta Force CYA illegally broke into an archaeological site!

No, really. We went to Phourni, a Minoan/Mycenaean site, and could only get into the site by climbing around on a large hill and hoisting ourselves over a rather large fence. According to our professors, Nigel and Stephanie, up until this year the site was only surrounded by a pesky little barbed wire fence- easy to climb over- but for some reason they had beefed up security and built a six foot tall wrought iron fence around the entire site. For some reason.

My guess is that the increased security might have had something to do with the large number of students breaking in multiple times a year. Just saying.

Anyways, this site was way cooler than Knossos because we were the only people there, possibly because of the fence. And the whole breaking and entering thing. It was really cool! These are some Mycenaean shaft graves, and as you can see they're in pretty good condition- you can see the remains of grave markers on two of them. All objects found in the site have been removed, of course.

If these look a bit small for graves to you, you're probably right- you couldn't lie a corpse down in one of them. The Mycenaeans buried their dead curled up in little clay coffins, and after ten years or so would remove the bones from the shaft and reinter them elsewhere. This way they could reuse the site!

Which, by the way, was very pretty. It was like much of Crete- sort of scrubby and dry but with beautiful views.
This is a tholos tomb, and it was so cool! This is a pretty small one, and it's pretty simple- the ones at Mycenae, which are very famous, are much bigger and I think more elaborate, though I haven't been there (yet). This one was really cool because we could actually go into the tomb (both the main chamber and the smaller side one) and see it for ourselves.

If you have never seen a tholos tomb, this might look a little strange. Tholoi are pretty cool- they're biggish tombs, partly underground, that are shaped like beehives. In this one you can see the dromos, which is the roas running up to the tomb, as well as the tomb itself.
Inside! It was big enough to fit multiple people, and I could stand in both chambers. Josh, who is a foot taller than I am, could not stand in the small side chamber but could stand in the main one.

And another part of the site! This is a very old part of the site- we broke in uphill, where the graves were newer, and worked our way down/back in time- and to try to explain all the walls would take pages and I would still be confused. There are several tholoi here, in bad condition, and rock walls built over a period of hundreds of years.