We walked off the ship and straight onto the Venetian walls for sunrise — the Lion Fountain was already glowing and the city still quiet. Twenty minutes later we were at Knossos just as it opened, and I stood there trying to wrap my mind around what I was seeing: the first palace on this spot was built around 2000 BC — four thousand years ago — making it the political and ceremonial heart of Europe's very first civilization. The Minoans were building complex urban settlements here when most of Europe was still living in scattered villages.

We had the Throne Room almost to ourselves for fifteen perfect minutes. The red columns, the dolphin fresco, that tiny alabaster throne — seeing them in real life after decades of textbooks made me tear up. An earthquake destroyed the first palace around 1700 BC, and what we see today is the second palace built on the ruins. The site is partially reconstructed — Sir Arthur Evans, the British archaeologist who excavated here from 1900 to 1913 (and again in the 1920s), added those distinctive red columns and concrete reconstructions. Some purists hate it; I loved it — it helps you feel the scale and understand why the palace's bewildering layout inspired the legend of the Minotaur's labyrinth.

At its peak around 1600 BC, as many as 100,000 people may have lived in and around Knossos — a staggering number for the Bronze Age. Evans coined the name "Minoan" after the legendary King Minos, and his excavations uncovered two ancient scripts: Linear A (still undeciphered) and Linear B (the earliest form of Greek). Standing there among the ruins, I kept thinking: this is where European civilization began.

Back in Heraklion we wandered the market — mountains of olives, honey in combs, mountain tea that smelled like the hills. We had lunch at Peskesi (farm-to-table Cretan) — lamb with stamnagathi greens and the best dakos I've ever had. In the afternoon, we visited the Archaeological Museum (built 1937-1940), which holds the world's finest collection of Minoan artifacts. The famous Snake Goddesses — bare-breasted priestesses holding writhing serpents — are even more mesmerizing in person, and the Phaistos Disc with its mysterious spiral of undeciphered symbols left me staring for twenty minutes.

The pros: you are walking through the Minoan world that basically invented European civilization — running water, multi-story architecture, sophisticated art, international trade. The cons: Knossos gets very hot and crowded by 11 a.m., and the weight of 4,000 years of history can be overwhelming.