[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_76

Fool’s gold, Maro Duka, 1979

“Under the blazing sun, there were droves of buses outside the Museum. The coming and going of the hordes of tourists disgusted me [...]. We complained about all those who had reduced Greece to a museum".

These are the words of one of the characters of the Cretan writer Maro Duka, but we now hear them in the mouths of anyone who lives in any European tourist city.

These are the words I thought about while visiting the Knossos site. I, too, was under the blazing sun, part of a horde of tourists coming out from droves of buses and cruises.

I saw people looking for traces of the labyrinth without finding any, and then, disappointed, looking for a reason to be there if the maze was not.

What is disgusting is not so much the "barbaric horde" but what is built to attract it, the one that transforms a place of culture into the symbol of misinformation, which needs to distort to fascinate.

Maybe knowing that "Labyrinth" is a Mycenaean word (from “Labrys,” the double-headed axe that decorated the rooms of the structure) created to give a name to the complex Minoan palaces in which the Mycenaeans struggled to orient themselves could be a sufficiently funny story, without having to bother with Minotaurs, unfortunate Ariadnes and cruise ships.

The stories that are sold often destroy the place they set out to save. Overtourism is not a problem of Knossos and its myth of the labyrinth; it's the problem of any landmark place that has become mainstream by exploiting its history and symbols.

I wonder how many would visit Venice if the city had not been linked to the infinite narratives – from Hollywood and elsewhere - that make it an exclusive symbol of luxury, prestige, and mystery.