Nestor’s Palace (Part 2)

The Throne room (artist’s reconstruction top left and bottom right)   

The Throne Room, or Megaron, was the seat of royal authority and the king received important visitors. A large circular hearth is clearly visible in the ruins as well as the bases for 4 columns which supported the ceiling. The room had been richly decorated with paintings which have been pieced together from fragments of painted plaster found during the excavation. Less obvious to us was a shallow trench in the floor which has been interpreted as  the place that king Nestor would have poured libations to the gods.

Oil store behind the Throne room   

The Linear B tablets revealed that the production and exchange of perfumed oils for cosmetic and medicinal benefit was an important economic activity for the palace. These perfumed oils were also used in funerary and religious rituals. As a result, directly behind the throne room was a large store room, purpose-designed to store these oils, presumably so that they could be presented to or exchanged with visitors to the palace.

Kitchens (L) and NE corner exterior wall of the palace (R)   

At the back of the palace were kitchens and other rooms for food preparation and at the northeast corner was the best-preserved piece of the exterior wall of the palace. A road ran down the side of the palace here and, at an archway, terracotta pipes supplied the palace with fresh water.

The Queen’s Megaron   

At the southeast corner of the palace was an independent suite of rooms next to the guards’ headquarters. Richly decorated, and very similar in style to the throne room with a circular hearth, these rooms are believed to have been the Queen’s Megaron. However, it is possible that they were used by the captain of the guard and his officers and that the queen’s apartments were upstairs.

The bathroom where Telemachus bathed   

Just north of Queen’s Megaron we saw a particularly interesting part of the palace: the bathroom. It’s the only example of a bathroom yet found in a Mycenaean palace on the Greek mainland and has been identified as the royal bath. Homer described how Polycaste, one of King Nestor’s daughters, bathed and cared for Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, during his stay at Pylos:

“Meanwhile the fair Polycaste, the youngest daughter of Nestor, son of Neleus, bathed Telemachus. And when she had bathed him and anointed him richly with oil, and had cast around him a fair cloack and a tunic, forth from the bath he came in form like unto the imortals; and he went and sat down by Nestor, the shepherd of the people.” Homer, Odyssey Book 3, 464-469.

It felt quite strange to be able to look at the bathroom where this happened so long ago.

The circuit complete, the walkway brought us back down to ground level close to the entrance to the palace. We had just a small information room to visit to finish the site.

Linear B talet and display boards in the information room   

The information room was actually very good. Display boards explained how Linear B was cracked and how the deciphered tables revealed the palatial economy in the 13^th century, including how the social structure of the kingdom worked. They also described in detail how the perfumed oil industry worked and how significant it was as an industry for the town.

The small museum at Chora   

In the nearby town of Chora we learned that there was a small museum displaying artefacts found at the Nestor’s Palace site. It was only a short drive away and so we visited; probably the only visitors of the day to this quiet backwater. Within the museum, we saw more Linear B tablets, hundreds of cooking pots and drinking vessels and jewellery found during the excavations of the palace. There was also a beautifully drawn diagram of the tiled floor to King Nestor’s Throne room produced by the archaeologists as they uncovered it.

With the museum visited we felt that we had definitely seen all that we could of King Nestor’s palace. But we still had half a day’s use of the hire car left. So, ancient Messini, missed on our outing from Kalamata because of Easter closures, became our next destination for the day.

Nestor’s Palace, Pílos, Greece