Akrotiri on Santorini: I. Introduction

Santorini, or Thera as it is also called, is considered by many as the most beautiful of all the Greek Islands. If not the most beautiful it is certainly the most spectacular. It is located some 100 kms north of Crete and has a rather peculiar shape, due to past vulcanic activity, which has changed its morphology quite often. The vulcanic activity is still continuing in the central part (the little islands Nea and Palea Kameni); the main island has the shape of a half moon and is nowadays crowded in summertime with sun- and pleasure-loving tourists. Especially impressive is the location of Santorini's main town, Phira, on top of a cliff high above the sea, and it is a must for cruise ships to stop right in front of the cliff (see the picture). It doesn't take too much fantasy to imagine that Santorini as it is now is a remnant of what was once an almost round island with a central mountain that was destroyed by the vulcanic explosion and was substituted with an inner lagoon that is hundreds of meters deep.

One of the most fascinating archeological sites is Akrotiri on the Greek Island of Santorini. Of course this is a personal opinion, but I have seen quite a lot of excavations and do not remember any other place that gave me such a strong feeling of emotion. First of all, when you enter the site you find yourself not in a place with lots of rubble to be interpreted with a book in your hand, but in a real town with houses, a small square (actually a triangle) and narrow streets. Second, this town is still as it was about 3500 years ago, when it had to be abandoned by its inhabitants, when the island was about to explode. Almost immediately after the excavations started (in 1967) some sensationally beautiful wall paintings were found, some of which have become iconic: the fisherman you can now find everywhere as a standard illustration of the Minoic epoch. The one shown on the right even gives you a glimpse of how the old Minoic town must have looked like.
 
What I find awe-inspiring is that, give or take a few hundred years, the Akrotiri explosion was as far removed in time from Pompei in the days it was covered by the ash of the Vesuvius as Pompei is to us. I always do a little trick that makes me get a better feeling of the time intervals involved: if we arbitrarily shift the year 0 back to the year 2000 BCE, then in the year 2012 the Emperor August would still be alive, and would have reigned from the early 1970s. Socrates would have walked in the streets of Athens around 1550, Homer would have composed the Iliad around perhaps 1200-1300, while the war of Troy itself had happened in 920 or thereabout. But the explosion of Santorini would have occurred most likely in 373. This gives some idea about how far removed in time this event really was: in our own time line, the Roman Empire was still undivided in the year 373 CE.

Since modern excavations at the Akrotiri site started, about fifty years ago, there has been much speculation about the volcanic explosion that destroyed Akrotiri, and perhaps the entire Minoic civilisation. The exact date is still controversial, although there is strong evidence that it must have occurred around 1627 BCE. There are two reasons for the excitement after the discovery of the Akrotiri site: first, the wall-paintings, see above, and second, it was proposed, already in the beginning of the twentieth century, that the eruption of the vulcano that covered Akrotiri with a thick layer of ash, was the basis for the Atlantis legend and its destruction. I come back to this in the fourth part of this story (click on IV in the left menu bar).