At Gournia an American lady, Miss Harriet Boyd
(now Mrs. Hawes), made the remarkable discovery of a whole town,
mainly dating from the close of the Middle Minoan period, though
the site had been occupied from the beginning of the Bronze Age.
Gournia had had its modest palace, occupying an area of about half
an acre, with its adaptation, on a diminutive scale, of the Knossian
Theatral Area, its magazines, and its West Court, where palace and
town met, as at Knossos, for business purposes. But the main interest
of the little town centred in its shrine and in the houses of the
burghers, with their evidences of a wonderfully even standard of
comfortable and peaceful life, by no means untinged with artistic
elegance.
The shrine, discovered in 1901, stood in the very heart of the
town, and was reached by a much-worn paved way. The sacred enclosure
was only some 12 feet square, and Mrs. Hawes is inclined to believe
that its rough walls never stood more than 18 inches high, forming
merely a little _temenos_, in which stood a sacred tree, and the
small group of cult objects which were still huddled together in
a corner of the shrine. 'It is true that they are very crude, made
in coarse terra-cotta, with no artistic skill; nevertheless, they
are eloquent, for they tell us that the Great Goddess was worshipped
in the town-shrine of Gournia, as in the Palace of Knossos.
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