Santorini

In Cornucopia 19, there is a colourful pictorial map of the islands of the Mediterranean seen from Rhodes near the Anatolian shore. At the top left is a smouldering volcano that is easily identified as Thera (Santorini). The map was copied from the walls of Çatalhüyük by the archaeologist James Mellart. It was painted 6-7,000 years ago, some 3,000 years before the island was destroyed in a volcanic eruption twice the strength of Krakatoa, and it shows just how connected the peoples of the Aegean and Mediterranean have always been. What is left of Thera (now more often called Santorini after St Irene, and under the Ottomans called Santurin) is part of a massive caldera wall rising a sheer 300 metres from the sea, sloping westwards across fertile volcanic soil where tomatoes and vines flourish. The Minoan inhabitants appear to have fled before the eruption occured (at about the same time of the desertion of Knossos in Crete) but their settlement at Akrotiri in the southwest remains. Discovered in 1967, it has been gradually explored, many of the finds going to the Archaeological Museum in Fira, the main town.