Nestor’s Palace travel guide

Further north and inland from Pylos is the Mycenaean Nestor’s Palace built in the 13th century BC, home of King Nestor, the generous host and wise polititian of Homer’s Iliad.

There is little more than metre high walls left of the building and its housed under a tin roof for protection making it visually unattractive. However, there is, for Greece,  an unusual amount of information there to help bring the palace to life and if you take your imagination there with you it’s a very rewarding place to visit.  Highlights are the throne room with a circular fireplace and, best of all, a decorated stone bathtub. An interesting comparison is that the palace was built not long after Stonehenge - monolithic stones or an indoor bathroom?

The site has particular archaeological importance because of the discovery there of tablets written in the ‘Linear B’ script. The content was inventories of the kingdom’s food and livestock but similar tablets written in Linear B had been found at Minoan sites in Crete. The Minoans used the Linear A script, so the discovery of the later Linear B tablets there indicates that the Myceneans gained control over the Minoans in their homeland of Crete.

There is a small museum in the village a couple of kilometers past the site where many artefacts from the site are displayed, However very little of it is labelled so you don’t know what you are looking at mostly and the linear B tablets on display are all copies, the originals being kept at the Archaeological Museum in Athens.