Something aMAZEing

Labyrinths date back to Greek mythology in which King Minos of Crete had a labyrinth designed and built at Knossos to hold the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull creature.

A mosaic depicting the Minotaur and its slayer, Theseus, inside the labyrinth at Knossos

I can vaguely remember visiting the Bronze Age ruins of this alleged labyrinth with my parents when I was a child and we were on holiday on Crete. These ruins were also featured in one of my all-time favorite computer games, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (this should look familiar to anyone who’s played it).

Some years later we visited a castle in France (I think) that had a vast hedge maze in the garden – or at least it felt vast (and extremely fascinating) for a pre-teen boy. What if one got lost in there, and never found a way back out?

Environmental Graffiti has listed the 10 most incredible mazes and labyrinths in the world. The most interesting realization for me, as I researched the subject a bit, was the distinction between a “maze” and a “labyrinth”. I had never thought there was one. Wikipedia explains:

The term labyrinth is often used interchangeably with maze, but modern scholars of the subject use a stricter definition. For them, a maze is a tour puzzle in the form of a complex branching passage with choices of path and direction; while a single-path (unicursal) labyrinth has only a single Eulerian path to the center. A labyrinth has an unambiguous through-route to the center and back and is not designed to be difficult to navigate.

When in turn visiting my late aunt’s summer cottage in Nauvo in the archipelago of Finland many years ago, she showed us a stone-lined labyrinth which in Finnish is called jatulintarha (sometimes translated as “giant’s guard”; jatuli were a race of giants in Finnish folklore). Most of these stone formations are from the Middle Ages or younger, although some of the oldest ones might even be prehistorical. No one knows their exact function; they might have been part of some ritual. Similar structures can be found in other Nordic countries. In Britain, labyrinths made out of turf are called Troy Town.

Jatulintarha, a Scandinavian stone labyrinth