Santorini is beautiful, and cries out for “panoramic” pictures. Here is Oia at the very northern end of the caldera, looking east and south along the front of the town.
This is only one of the towns perched on the rim of the caldera. Fira is the main town, and location of the cable car and walk from the port to the town above – only a 200-metre climb if you are silly enough to take the stairs. The views from the top are spectacular and are the main drawcard for visitors. My guess is that the cruise liners that we saw could hold 2,500 passengers each, of which most, maybe 2000, would visit the island for the day. On a “quiet day”, we saw three liners. On a busy day in the summer season, there could be six, seven, maybe up to ten of these monsters. There is no way the existing infrastructure can cater for that many people, so there are two ports for visitors: one with the cable car (and donkeys, but there are moves to ban their use completely) and one that has road access for busses.
At night we walked along the corniche of Fira and came to the line for the cable car for the tourists to return to their ships. Thousands of Amerikans queueing for the cable car, with the queue stretching in a vast snake down alleys and streets. There were thousands of people for a cable car that has a 1200-passenger-per-hour capacity. From our watching, it looked like the six gondola sets were moving at 1 trip per three to four minutes. (It is a funicular with a single cable with twelve gondolas in two groups of six each, with one set going down as the other set heads up to the town).
Okay, enough of the obligatory "Santorini is beautiful" stuff.
More importantly for me, we visited Akrotiri.
The Minoan town/city that was destroyed by the eruption of the volcano that created the caldera is probably one of the most significant events in human history (in and around the Med, that is). In about 1620 BC, the volcano erupted, wiping out any civilisation on Santorini, sending an enormous tsunami across the Aegean, and probably directly causing the fall of the palace complexes in Minoan Crete. It was the end of the Minoan civilisation.
We visited the Prehistory Museum in Fira. What a fantastic museum. And there is so much to think about from there. It is on two floors, with the lower being dedicated to the frescos and murals found so far in Akrotiri. After going to the site, the museum was a form of completion, filling in some, but so few, of the gaps after looking at what appears to be a massive hanger filled with controlled rubble.
In the museum, among the artefacts found at the site, is a bronze dagger. The shape and design elements are similar to the Mycenaean daggers in the Archaeological Museum in Athens.
The dagger on the left is from Akrotiri (16th-17th century BC), while the two on the right are from Grave Circle B in Mycenae, also from the 16th-17th century BC. There certainly can be little doubt that there was extensive contact between the Mycenaean and Minoan cultures.
The museum in Fira has the frescos, some of the most beautiful to be seen anywhere in the world.
I am curious about the actual population of Thera/Santorini before the eruption. The range of pottery found at Akrotiri, and the beauty of the frescos speaks to a significant population. These were not the works or production of a few people, or a few talented people in a village of 300 – 500 people. These must speak to a significant population with specialist classes, and trade between islands. Yet if they were big enough to trade such goods with other islands, then there must have been a big enough population of the isle to make it worthwhile for traders to sail to or to stop by the island on their trade routes.
What was the cost of that dagger? It was probably not made on Thera, so it would have been imported or bought on a trading mission from Akrotiri. Such a dagger, if manufactured on the Greek mainland in or around Mycenae, would be a high-value item for its owner. Such a dagger would speak to the wealth and authority of the owner and the ability of the owner to expend the resources required to gain ownership of that dagger.
So, an isolated village on Thera would probably not have been able to marshal the economic resources to purchase that dagger. But a warrior chieftain in a productive town, managing trade and commerce between cities, on and off the island, not only could afford such a dagger, but would have needed something like that to demonstrate status. Maybe even “needing” it for its beauty alone.
After all, the people of Akrotiri have told us that they travelled. And commonly enough to paint a fresco of travel from one city to another, possibly from one land and culture to another. And not in a palace or on public display in a central square or public complex, but above the windows in a private home (or so the archaeologists have determined it was a private home).
Likewise, the frescos. Who painted them? If it was an indigenous resident of Thera, it was certainly one who studied in Crete or had access to the Cretan style, access that would not have come from “books” but from seeing Cretan styles up close, probably by studying under a Cretan artist. That would make the artist a valued specialist in the community.
And what about the material for the colours? The development of a palette of colours and the associated chemicals to create each colour? While the knowledge of how to create the colours may have been well established elsewhere, a developed local economy with significant surpluses would be required to source and import the elements making up each colour, where such elements were not readily available in the local geology and plant life.
So, how many people lived on Thera/Santorini before the eruption that ended their civilisation? I have no idea. But it must have had a significant population to support the city of Akrotiri alone. And we should not assume that Akrotiri is the only such city on the island.
In the museum, a guide said that the travelling fresco showed communication with Egypt. I'm not convinced, but then, I'm not a historian or specialist in Minoan culture and history. But the fresco to me looks more like visiting the next city along the coast, or possibly a bit further. The building styles are the same. More importantly, the landscape behind each town is mountainous, something that would never have been reported on a visit to Egypt.
If there is an argument in favour of the Egypt theory, it would be that the boats have a distinctly Egyptian look to them. But why would a society paint frescos that only depicted ships from a distant land, when they were seagoing and trading peoples themselves, with their own ship designs? They painted what they saw in front of them.
Santorini is not hugely distant from other Cycladic islands, so it would not have been isolated. Nor is it geographically different from the other islands.
Was this Atlantis?
Almost certainly, though not quite. Plato is the only source for the history of Atlantis, so the first question is whether the entire myth was a complete fabrication, a historical fantasy novel? Or were there clues and hints that he simply drew upon to create a framework for his dialogue?
We know that oral traditions and history can survive for hundreds of years. The Maori of New Zealand retained and transmitted their oral histories across many generations. Moari can trace their ancestry back almost 700-900 years to one of nine voyaging canoes. Yes, nine voyaging canoes centuries in the past, and individuals today know which canoe their ancestors arrived on. Okay, there may be some "drift" in details, but oral histories carry real information that survives across centuries.
Did Plato harvest themes and storylines to create his Atlantis? If he did, there is no better candidate for a city on a circular island that plunges into the sea and disappears overnight.
Was Akrotiri the city of Atlantis? Most probably not. In fact, Akrotiri may be nothing more than the seaside retreat and port for citizens of the "real" Atlantis, formerly sited in or near the area that is now the caldera. We cannot know that, but we can look upon the frescos of Akrotiri and wonder just how many cities there were on Santorini/Thera, and how many remain to be found.
