Crete

Crete, the largest of the Greek islands, was the seat of the Minoan civilisation, the earliest high culture of the Aegean, with its great palaces at Knossos and its still-undeciphered scripts — a splendour the later Greeks remembered in the legends of King Minos, the Labyrinth, and the Minotaur.

In myth Crete was the birthplace of Zeus himself: there Rhea hid the infant god in a cave from his father Kronos, and the Kouretes clashed their shields to drown his cries. The island gave the tradition the sage Epimenides, and its ancient laws and customs were studied by the Greek philosophers as among the oldest and wisest.