On Explosions
“Tis laid all these Islands role from the bottom of the Sea. What a rather frightful sight to see he teeming Earth bring forth such unwieldy dens! What prodigious force must there needs be, to move ’em, displace ’em, and lift ’em above the Water! No wonder the Port of Santorin has no bottom: the Hollow whence that Island issued, must by mechanical Necessity at the same time be occupy’d by a like Bulk of Water. What Shocks, what Concussions must have been excited in the Neighbourhood of it, when this Abyss all of a sudden fill’d it self up again!”
-Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, A Voyage Into the Levant…3v., 1741. From Travels in the Southern Cyclades, ed. John L. Tomkinson, 2013.
Hey our man Pitton de Tournefort may have been a bit overexcited but there is no question that Santorini’s history is marked by some fairly incredible geological incidents. The Minoan Eruption of Thera of approximately 1600 BC was one of the largest volcanic events in history. The Theran volcano produced four times as much ash as the Krakatoa eruption of the 19th century and caused a tsunami that may have been as high as 150 meters, devastating the eastern half of Crete; the 2011 tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, which was caused by the largest earthquake ever recorded in that country, led to waves of only 40 meters. The explosion blew Earth off of its axis and is theorized by some academics to have led to or contributed to the downfall of Minoan civilization. The effect on the atmosphere was enormous; tree rings from as far as California register a significant climatic event from 1628 BC. The explosion ripped the island into pieces, creating a horseshoe-shaped main island, Santorini (or Thira) and a smaller second island, Thirasia. Subsequent volcanic events created the islands of Palea (Old) and Nea (New) Kameni; the former appearing as if a rocky, greenish lump of western Ireland had been dropped in the Aegean, its younger brother naught more than a barren lump of black stones. Pitton De Tournfort describes the eruption leading to the formation of Nea Kameni thus: “a prodigious quantity of Pumice-Stones was seen to arise from the Port of Santorin; that they ascended from the bottom of the Sea with such noise and impetuosity, tha one would have thought ’em to be the Bursts of Cannon. At Scio, above 200 miles from the place, they fancy’d the Venetian Army was fighting the Turks.”
The “Black Island,” Nea Kameni
As violent as its history may be, Santorini’s bizarre geomorphology is what makes it such an entrancing place to visit today. Within view from the hill upon which our apartment sat is nearly the entire caldera, from the enormously famous village of Oia at the northern tip of the island to Akrotiri in the south. Akrotiri gives its name to a massive unearthed settlement, the main victim of the Theran eruption, once an evidently prosperous and cosmopolitan member of the Minoan trading network, then buried until its full rediscovery in the 1970s by Greek archeologist Spyridon Marinatos. The treasures uncovered, which included incredibly vibrant and expressive wall paintings, now fill a museum in the main Santorinan town of Fira, as well as a hall in the National Archeological Museum in Athens. Professor Marinatos tragically died in a fall from the wall of one of the excavated buildings; according to a guide at the site his rather curious last request was that he be buried in the midst of the excavation along with his wife when she passed. His rather obliging disciples dutifully buried him in the middle of their worksite and only exhumed his remains once his wife had died, his children apparently having little interest in having their parents laid to rest in an archeological dig.
The approximate resting place of Prof. Marinatos, before his exhumation
I noted that the full rediscovery of Akrotiri was by Marinatos; it should be said that earlier excavations of the area were undertaken by the Frenchman Francois Foque, as well as German Baron Fredrich Hiller von Gaertringen, in the 19th century. Given the rather fraught politics over foreign archeologists and, uh, “expropriators” of Greek antiquity it perhaps comes as no surprise that the contributions of the Western Europeans are housed in a shabby little museum in Fira while the discoveries of Marinatos and his (also Greek) successors find their home in a brand new, sleek museum across town.
At any rate, the exhibitions in the shiny new museum and in the National Archeological Museum are impressive and indicate that the people living on Santorini had a sophisticated and wealthy colony going. Following their destruction, it would be some time, essentially not until the rise of mass tourism, that such wealth would be seen upon the island again.
On the Wisdom of Crowds
Soundtrack: “Purple Prose of Cairo” by the Mystery Jets
If there is a single most famous image of Santorini, it is probably that of the whitewashed, blue-domed buildings of the village of Oia. The beautiful, starkly colored buildings contrasted against the bright sky and the deep blue water are a favored desktop background and calendar picture. It has led to Oia becoming the single most popular tourist destination on the island.
Surprising that it ended up that way- moored as it was at the very end of the cliffs forming the caldera wall, it was a village of no particular note other than as the home of some fairly successful merchants (none of the 18th or 19th century travelers whose accounts are in Travels in the Southern Cyclades have anything to say about the place), and that was before it got flattened by an earthquake in 1956. The citizens of Oia certainly appear to have taken the earthquake as a big opportunity to scrub up and give everything a fresh coat of (gleaming, white) paint, because it wasn’t terribly long after that the tourists started to come.
The approach to Oia was not particularly promising. After traveling along a mountain road that tested our Volkswagen Up(!)’s limited abilities sorely (by limited I mean sometimes you press the gas pedal to the floor and nothing happens at all for 3-4 butt-clenching seconds) we found our way to the access road. Entirely choked by cars and lined with unimpressive-looking restaurants, hotels and rental car offices it reminded me of the road into Bar Harbor in high season, but without all of the lobster regalia, which makes a big difference when you are crawling along trapped in a cloud of diesel fumes spewed by the truck in front of you. We managed to park the car and make our way to the village. At first there was no particular joy to be found here either. The newest additions to the main marble-paved street of the village are wall-to-wall expensive jewelry, watch and fashion shops with a couple of local, though still high-end art galleries to help people remember they are in Greece rather than a very nice outdoor mall in Boca Raton.
But if you get past all that, and are willing to dodge/swim move/elbow a crowd that numbers the population of Austria there are still some sublime spots to be found. They certainly do take work to get to though. We wandered the streets and managed to find a quiet pocket here and there, but fleeting moments looking over the town and listening to the crash of the waves against nearby Thirasia were invariably interrupted, whether by a gargatuan Russian tour group or by a Spanish girl who had enlisted her poor, sweating mother for a glamor photoshoot. Clad in a massive, heavy looking Grecian princess dress, the girl herself must have been suffocating during her Instagram shoot and offered a cautionary tale to the budding social mediaite- how much the price of likes?
They say that the sunsets from Oia are the most magical in all of Santorini. We did not stay to find out. As Grace said, the views from our own village of Pyrgos, described by Pitton de Tournefort as the “prettiest Town in all the Island… from whence you discern two seas”, were perfect, and we didn’t have to share them with anyone other than our rotund neighbor and his extremely loud folk tunes.
No question that Oia is beautiful. But being there, for the first time on this particular journey, we felt as though we might be part of something destructive- how many visitors can a small place bear before it isn’t itself anymore? And even if we think we’re a better breed of traveler- not loud, don’t take pictures in houses of worship, try to fit in to the extent possible- don’t we want the same good photos as everyone else? Don’t we enjoy a beer with a view (at a cost perhaps out of reach for a local)? It is not particularly revelatory for the traveler to bemoan his own impact or long for a day before tourism’s heavy hand exacted its price on places. But we live in the small world we’re in, and besides, as I’ll have a chance to write in later posts, the very earliest visitors to many of the places we are going often had a pretty terrible time, so I suppose I will take crowds and McDonalds over being thrown in a dungeon.
For my money, if you’re on Santorini go take a look at Emporio. The old town, which hovers above a strip of shops that might actually be useful to locals, had the feel of an abandoned Star Wars set- the organic forms and tiny alleys led to repeated visual delight. Around any corner might be a church, an odd-shaped courtyard, a view of the castle ruins, and for us each was its own little revelation. In Emporio we saw only one other pair of tourists; for most of our time walking through the old town we didn’t even see another soul. That may mean that some people don’t think it’s as beautiful as other parts of the island, and I won’t try and debate that. But we certainly found it easier to contemplate the beauty there was while not ensconced in a large Muscovite’s armpit.
Emporio streetscape
A Sailor’s Life is the Life for Me
Few things drove home the geologic diversity and beauty of the island as our sunset trip on a catamaran, which was kindly given as a wedding gift by my brother Rob, old sea dog that he is. We went with Captain Ted’s and it was evidence that sometimes the most famous got that way for a reason. The trip left from his own private harbor, down a rather precipitous road (had we been forced to drive it rather than get a car transfer from Captain Ted, the VW Up! would have been rendered the VW Up?) with only 12 passengers.
The crew was knowledgeable and solicitous, able to explain many of the visible geological curiosities in the area (I have them to thank for putting me on the trail of some of the info above about the Theran eruption). They took us to swim at a notorious sulfurous spring that might be best described as a warm rather than a hot spring and then took us past Fira port, explaining that prior to the building of the current funicular the only way to get goods and people up was by donkey. Once plans for the funicular were announced, the donkey drivers protested so vociferously that they were given a seat at the table and managed to get themselves a cut of the proceeds from the funicular and apparently did quite well out of the deal. He described them as “the richest men in Santorini” but I gotta say, unless that funicular is transporting straight up gold bars I’ve seen an awful lot of dudes in helicopters around Santorini so I think you’ve gotta get above funicular money to be the top of the heap here.
We swung around to the south side of the island, past a wind-sculpted spire reminiscent of “Winged Victory of Samothrace” in the Louvre, and had a delicious dinner off the “Red Beach” with our fellow passengers: a young French boy and his father, who was sporting a brand new and totally sweet tattoo of dolphins jumping; a retired husband and wife from Pennsylvania, who had been, respectively, the public advocate for the state of Pennsylvania and an Assistant US Attorney; a Scotsman living in Australia, in the midst of a three-month trip around Europe, and his mother; and two scientists from San Diego and their two children. The elder of the two children, an 18-year old on his way to Princeton, was so mature and charismatic that I admit I found him slightly frightening. I am sure he will do fantastically well and I look forward to reading about his congressional campaign soon.
And the main event, the sunset? Well, as always in Santorini, it was sublime.
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