“So our exhibition is a happy collaboration with Crete, which has lent us key artefacts.” Elgin is demonised in Greece for taking the marbles to the British Museum whereas Sir Arthur is still celebrated because of the way he popularised Minoan culture. “Evans may have fallen out with Kalokairinos, but his story is the opposite to Elgin’s. “We want to set the story straight,” said Andrew Shapland, the Sir Arthur Evans curator of bronze age and classical Greece at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford.
While it will acknowledge Evans’s positive legacy, it belatedly gives full recognition to Minos Kalokairinos, the Cretan businessman and scholar who originally found the famous ruins. Now the full history of Knossos, reputed home of the minotaur – the half-man, half-bull monster of legend – is to be displayed for the first time in a major British exhibition.
