| West of ancient Gortys is the so-called “Labyrinth”, a quarry linked to the legends of Theseus and the Minotaur as early as the 11th century. When the Florentine traveller Cristoforo Buondelmonti visited the quarry in 1416, he explored it meticulously and described it in his work Descriptio Cretae; he even mentioned that he had found the names of many previous visitors carved in the rock. The earliest of these names went back to the 14th century, a fact confirmed by the later traveller Savary. Thus visits to the “Labyrinth” started or at least intensified from the time when the humanist movement in the West turned its adherents’ attention to the monuments and historical memorials of antiquity. |