When you arrive by ship on the north coast of Crete, in particular at this time of the year, you are greeted by a breathtaking panorama: To the right, the shining white peak of the 2450m Ida massif. To the left, also still snow-covered, the 2150m Dikta mountains far in the distance. Competing with these two, directly in the center, rather isolated, looms Mt. Jouktas.

Jouktas has no snow at this time of the year, because with its 811m it is much lower. But since it is also closer, the mountain silhouette, surrounded by lower lands, looks just as impressive. And it's shape is remarkable, too.

Again and again the mountain silhouette has been compared to "sleeping Zeus", and it is easy to see, why. I took the photo somewhere in the western part of Heraklion.

So would the Minoans, who put up a peak sanctuary on top of Mt. Jouktas, and who have looked at it from Knossos, have seen in it the sleeping giant god of thunder?

Interestingly, the place from which I took the first picture, had no significance in Minoan times. Nobody saw the mountain from there. Instead, the Minoan harbor of Poros is much further east, closer to the unromantic container harbor of modern day Heraklion. The closest you can easily get to the perspective that incoming ships from Dia once might have had, is by walking to the very end of the pier that is dominated by the Venetian castello. From there, Mt. Jouktas has remarkably changed it's silhouette.

Guess, what the Mountain Goddess displayed to the Minoans looking in the direction of Knossos?

In fact, Mt. Jouktas is a narrow north-south spine, and Poros, as well as Knossos are situated in the extension of this spine, where the shape of the different pinnacles of Mt. Jouktas collapse perspectively into one homogenous and quite obvious female breast. (The nipple today is even accentuated by an ugly phone station immediately next to the peak sanctuary, but even without this modern structure the shape is very clear.)

Switch locations and stand on top of the stairs of the Knossos excavation site (which you shouldn't do, but at this time of the year your chances to get there anyway are higher than usual). Look around.

The first observation I made is that - different from the pier at Heraklion, the view is pretty much blocked all around. Everywhere you read that Knossos is built on a hill. True. But just as true is the fact that it is in all directions surrounded by hills higher than Kephala.

There are exactly two points where your view is not blocked by the surrounding hills: South you see - again, not a sleeping giant but a breast - Jouktas. And about 180⁰ in the other direction you perceive a little glittering of the sea. Maybe this is my imagination gone wild, but I am pretty sure this is the location of Poros.

And I conclude: Firstly, the competition has been locked out. Ida and Dikta are blocked from sight. Secondly, Poros and Knossos see each other (and Knossos doesn't see too much else). Thirdly, the axis Poros - Knossos - Jouktas is the one in which the goddes displays her breast. Fourthly, the palace is oriented in this axis.

But wait. While I try to figure out where exactly the palace "looks", I am bewildered by the fact that where I stand - in Evans' "Piano Nobile", the assumed great hall of the upper floor of the palace's west wing, things are not aligned. I look at the printed plan (even the big one by Fyfe, included in Macdonald's book) and everything is perfectly straight. But when I try to see exactly where these lines look to, I find that in reality they are not. Between the great South-West portico and the pillar bases of the "Piano Nobile" there is a clear angle. I am not sure how sloppy Evens' reconstruction was, but I can't imagine that he actually twisted the architecture, therefore I declare him innocent. Just as certainly the Minoans knew how to build straight walls, because some others are remarkably straight all over the length of the complex. So I claim that there was something going on in Minoan times that changed the exact perspective of parts of the palace. (Macdonald has nicely shown that many of the elements have been built, rebuilt, renovated and collapsed at different times).

And in any case, and in contradiction to my previous statement, the north-south walls look a tiny bit to the left of Mt. Jouktas. Fourni?

Switch locations again. In the absense of a significant number of bronze-age graveyards around Knossos, the nekropolis of Fourni appears to have been relevant to Knossos as a burial ground. Fourni doesn't look north. As if the dead turn their back at the palace, the nekropolis at the foot of Mt. Jouktas is located on the south slope of a hill, looking away from Knossos.

There is a strong tie, however, between the peak sanctuary on top of the mountain on an eastern slope and the burial ground looking up. These two locations face each other.

I don't know how much to read into this. Maybe the "summer palace" in Archanes (whatever this structure really was), the cemetery of Fourni, the little temple at Anemospilia, which all lie east of Mt. Jouktas, have given orientation to some parts of the palace. In any case, the sleeping Zeus was never a figure relevant to Knossos.