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I’ve actually been to Nestor’s Palace at Pylos. Back in the 1970s, when I was a kid. We were in Greece visiting my brother, who was stationed there in the military, when my mom struck up a conversation with a woman who turned out to be a classics professor from Georgetown U. We accompanied her on her trip to Nestor’s tomb. She was visiting it because it had been mentioned in Homer’s Iliad, I believe. It was the first archeological ruin I ever visited. Nearby was a tomb called Hera’s tomb, built in an igloo pattern of stacked blocks.

I didn’t know about Blegen, and that it was an important discovery.

Blegen found a palace there--the only reason for saying it was Nestor's is that Homer says he ruled in sandy Pylos. In the Odyssey Telemachus travels around trying to find out if anyone has heard what had happened to his father, and one of the places he visits is Pylos, so the palace is described in that work. Homer says Telemachus was given a bath, and a bathtub was discovered at Pylos.

Blegen was lucky to find the archive room with a large number of tablets in Linear B shortly after the dig started--that was a critical discovery leading to the decipherment of Linear B in 1952 with the help of those tablets. (There was a larger number of tablets found at Knossos but apparently Sir Arthur Evans had hoarded them trying to be the one to decipher the script.) After 1939 they couldn't go back again until 1951 or so because of World War II and then the Greek Civil War.