DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.811#0349
IMPRESSIVE EFFECT OF GRAND STAIRCASE RESTORED 301
similar records on the side blocks, but several of the gypsum steps have
themselves been preserved. The flights below are practically complete,
with the balustrades and the sockets for the supporting columns.
The Grand Staircase as thus re-compacted stands alone among ancient Impres-
architectural remains. With its charred columns solidly restored in their effect.
pristine hues, surrounding in tiers its central well, its balustrades rising,
practically intact, one above the other, with its imposing fresco of the great
Minoan shields on the back walls of its middle gallery, now replaced in
replica, and its still well-preserved gypsum steps ascending to four landings,
it revives, as no other part of the building, the remote past. It was, indeed,
my own lot to experience its strange power of imaginative suggestion, even
at a time when the work of reconstitution had not attained its present
completeness. During an attack of fever, having found, for the sake of A vision
better air,1 a temporary lodging in the room below the inspection tower pjte
that has been erected on the neighbouring edge of the Central Court, and
tempted in the warm moonlight to look down the staircase-well, the whole
place seemed to awake awhile to life and movement. Such was the force
of the illusion that the Priest-King with his plumed lily crown, great ladies,
tightly girdled, flounced and corseted, long-stoled priests, and, after them,
a retinue of elegant but sinewy youths—as if the Cup-bearer and his fellows
had stepped down from the walls—passed and repassed on the flights below.
Loggia of the ' Shield Fresco'.
On the East side of the staircase well, level with the third landing, Loggia
was a loggia of which the lower part of the front balustrade—similar to that fc^^id
of the staircase itself—was partially preserved above the entablature of the Fresco',
lower Colonnade.2 A remarkable feature here came to light above the
remains of the architrave of the lower Columns, in the shape of the carbon-
ized ends of smaller round beams—somewhat sagging down—that had
immediately supported the floor of the loggia. This was itself entered by
a wide opening from the portico on the North side of the light-well, while
a doorway in its Southern wall, the jambs of which were preserved in position,
led to the interior part of the residential wing on that side.
At the time of the final catastrophe of the Palace, the back wall of the
neighbouring Service Staircase at its second flight seems to have been
1 At the time of the first restoration of the vii), p. 107. The parapet was found in a
staircase our head-quarters were still in the un- ruinous state and was removed to enable
healthy Turkish house in the river valley below, it to be re-supported. In the end it had to be
2 See A. E.,J£twssos, Report, 1901 (U.S.A., largely restored.
similar records on the side blocks, but several of the gypsum steps have
themselves been preserved. The flights below are practically complete,
with the balustrades and the sockets for the supporting columns.
The Grand Staircase as thus re-compacted stands alone among ancient Impres-
architectural remains. With its charred columns solidly restored in their effect.
pristine hues, surrounding in tiers its central well, its balustrades rising,
practically intact, one above the other, with its imposing fresco of the great
Minoan shields on the back walls of its middle gallery, now replaced in
replica, and its still well-preserved gypsum steps ascending to four landings,
it revives, as no other part of the building, the remote past. It was, indeed,
my own lot to experience its strange power of imaginative suggestion, even
at a time when the work of reconstitution had not attained its present
completeness. During an attack of fever, having found, for the sake of A vision
better air,1 a temporary lodging in the room below the inspection tower pjte
that has been erected on the neighbouring edge of the Central Court, and
tempted in the warm moonlight to look down the staircase-well, the whole
place seemed to awake awhile to life and movement. Such was the force
of the illusion that the Priest-King with his plumed lily crown, great ladies,
tightly girdled, flounced and corseted, long-stoled priests, and, after them,
a retinue of elegant but sinewy youths—as if the Cup-bearer and his fellows
had stepped down from the walls—passed and repassed on the flights below.
Loggia of the ' Shield Fresco'.
On the East side of the staircase well, level with the third landing, Loggia
was a loggia of which the lower part of the front balustrade—similar to that fc^^id
of the staircase itself—was partially preserved above the entablature of the Fresco',
lower Colonnade.2 A remarkable feature here came to light above the
remains of the architrave of the lower Columns, in the shape of the carbon-
ized ends of smaller round beams—somewhat sagging down—that had
immediately supported the floor of the loggia. This was itself entered by
a wide opening from the portico on the North side of the light-well, while
a doorway in its Southern wall, the jambs of which were preserved in position,
led to the interior part of the residential wing on that side.
At the time of the final catastrophe of the Palace, the back wall of the
neighbouring Service Staircase at its second flight seems to have been
1 At the time of the first restoration of the vii), p. 107. The parapet was found in a
staircase our head-quarters were still in the un- ruinous state and was removed to enable
healthy Turkish house in the river valley below, it to be re-supported. In the end it had to be
2 See A. E.,J£twssos, Report, 1901 (U.S.A., largely restored.