Knossos

Ventilation

Due to its placement on the hill, the palace received sea breezes during the summer. It had porticoes and airshafts.

Lighting and heating

The palace was designed to take best advantage of natural lighting during the long days of the summer season. The suites of rooms were arranged around courtyards to provide more window openings, the doors were polythyra ("multiple-door") to provide more door opening area, stairs wound around the periphery of light wells, and corridors were open porticos wherever possible. One cannot imagine that the palace shut down at night for lack of light, however. Minoan Crete had a long tradition of ceramic lamps, which consisted of a reservoir of olive oil surrounded by niches for one or more wicks. The better lamps multiplied the niches and wicks to provide more candle-power.

Winter must have presented the Palace of Minos with as much of a heating problem as its architecture solved the lighting problem. The wind would have swept through the open palace, increasing the chill factor, unless the openings were blocked. The door openings must have been provided with doors of wood or bronze, as in later Classical times. The Town Mosaic, a depiction of houses on faience found at Knossos, shows windows with cross-members and four panes, suggesting that some translucent substance was used to block the openings. There is no sign of glass panes.

No central heating is in evidence. The rooms must have been heated individually. Fixed hearths were used to some degree but there is long tradition of portable ceramic hearths as well. The Minoans never made the transition from a portable hearth to a closed metal stove, which would have been technologically within their grasp and are much more efficient radiators.

Fires within the palace were for the most part of charcoal, probably lit with olive oil, in hearths or braziers. The tall drafty rooms, probably with smoke openings at the top (the roofs did not survive), were designed to keep the smoke away from the humans and evacuate it as quickly as possible. The palace undoubtedly reeked of smoke within and gave a pillar of it without. The odor problem would have been solved with incense and perfumed unguents kept in pyxes, as far as it could be.

The emphasis of palace civilizations in colder climes on home production of textiles is understandable. The open vests of the women and the loin cloths of the nearly **** men could only have been summer attire. No frescos of snow-clad mountains and frosty plains are in evidence, such as appear in Crete in the winter. Over such a length of time, no perishables, such as boots or winter robes, have survived, but the frescos cannot depict year-round ordinary life in Crete.