Was this Atlantis?

Twenty years ago, a group of friends and I took a simple ferry boat ride from the island of Mykonos to the island of Santorini. After a trip of what seemed like eternity and just as the sun was about to set, I became vaguely aware of a rush of excitement among my fellow passengers and roused myself to see what the commotion was all about.

As I peered into the distance, I gradually saw majestic black cliffs rising from the sea in a vertical trajectory. As the ferry sailed closer, I noticed that atop them were large white rocks, making the cliffs look like a giant white-crested wave frozen in time. As we sailed even closer, I realized to my surprise that what I had thought to be large white rocks were actually whitewashed buildings clinging precariously to the cliffs. As we sailed into the bay of Santorini, there appeared an even greater number of them until they finally coalesced into villages and large towns. As dusk fell, my giant white-crested wave blended into the sea and disappeared while the lights of its towns flickered on one by one until they are all ablaze and looked like a spray of diamonds flung across the face of night by some profligate god.

This was my first, mind-boggling introduction to Santorini and it has remained etched in my imagination ever since. Now 20 years later, with wife and sons in tow, I was determined to revisit Santorini and share its beauty with my loved ones. This time, however, due to the pressures of time, we flew to the island and thus saw it from a different perspective. From the sky, the island of Santorini looks like a black scar upon Homer’s wine-dark sea, a stark reminder of its cataclysmic origins.

Four thousand years ago in the Aegean, there existed a sophisticated and culturally complex civilization known as the Minoan civilization. The late English archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, enthusiastically named it after that powerful and wily monarch of Greek mythology, Minos, although there was no evidence at all in his excavations that such a king existed. This was a bourgeois, moneyed, urban and wide-ranging Bronze Age maritime power that scoured the Mediterranean and traded with other contemporary civilizations. They built vast palace complexes, lived in large towns with sewerage systems and decorated their homes with frescoes of graceful deer, dancing swallows, stylized flora, athletic youths and barebreasted women. This civilization was centered on the island of Crete but had a satellite on the island of Thera, as Santorini is also called.

The circular island of Thera had a caldera in its middle which erupted in a cataclysm 10 times more powerful than that of Krakatoa in Indonesia. Its blast was heard as far away as Egypt and it poured millions of cubic feet of ash into the atmosphere, lowered temperatures around the globe and caused vermilion sunsets for several months thereafter. The eruption created a rift through which the sea poured into the caldera. Half the island crashed into the sea as a result and what remained after all this chaos was a crescent shaped island with ash cliffs rising spectacularly from the waters of the Aegean. It was into the remains of this giant caldera that I sailed with my friends that evening 20 years ago.

Unlike my first trip to Santorini when my friends and I had to settle for an inn in the middle of nowhere as there were no other rooms available, I decided to splurge a little and chose to stay in an inn perched on the cliffs in the town of Fira, Santorini’s capital.

The Asteras Villas, which I found through Yahoo Travel, are a cluster of suites that are carved into the soft pumice cliffs. I chose a deluxe suite with two bedrooms, a living room, a fully equipped kitchenette and a large private terrace overlooking the bay at a price of US$140 per day, exclusive of breakfast. The suite, being carved into the cliff, was quite linear, meaning you walked in from the terrace into the living room into the first bedroom into the master bedroom. Another odd result of being carved into the cliff was discovered by my son Rodrigo. Once we had settled into our rooms, he chose to lie in bed to read a book. Thirty minutes later, he sprang out of bed surprised by a thin layer of white powder over his body. We dissolved into peals of laughter when we discovered that this was a layer of ash coming off the ceiling of our suite!

One thing that any visitor to Santorini who chooses to live cliffside should realize, sooner rather than later, is that life becomes vertical. Everything is either up there or down there, never this way or that way. It also helps to be fit, especially if you’ve got to carry heavy luggage half a mile up or half a mile down.

Besides its spectacular views and black sand beaches, Santorini has a small Archaeological Museum in Fira (which is worth seeing if only to get an idea of what Minoan life was like) and the excavations at Akrotiri. The latter is quite famous because of the brilliant frescoes which were unearthed there and are now housed in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Despite their absence, however, the excavations give the tourists an idea of how advanced the Therans were. The town was laid out in a grid pattern with elaborate three-storeyed residences, public squares, ample storerooms, lavatories and sophisticated drainage systems. Such modernity has led some to believe that Thera was Atlantis.

The town of Fira itself is charming, with its one main street snaking its way through the center of town along the ridge of the ancient caldera surrounded on both sides by restaurants, bars and shops. There are no cars allowed here. The main means of transport is to go on foot, save for the occasional donkey that has to trek up and down the cliffs loaded with some overweight tourist. And no matter where you turn you get that spectacular view!

There is a curious ritual which every cliffside dweller in Santorini follows. About an hour before sunset, he scurries home to his terrace, sets up a bottle of wine, settles into a comfortable chair and stares at the view spread out before him. Below him are the ash cliffs that plunge into the Aegean. On the horizon is the island of Therasia, which was once part of Santorini before the cataclysm. In the center of the bay are Nea Kameni and Palea Kameni, the only remnants of the ancient volcano. There are signs of life on these islands, echoes of people gradually settling down after a long day at work. Interspersed among the islands are the many ships visiting Santorini, regally sailing to and from the islands. Further out on the horizon are eagles flying, their outspread wings framed against the setting sun. The sun sets slowly over this majestic panorama, not with a fiery tropical burst of color but with a roseate hue that dissipates into a glow and goes paler and paler until it is finally extinguished. Then he is nudged out of his reverie by the tinkle of streetlights being turned on and by the slow crescendo of sound arising from the bustle of evening commerce. As he goes off to join the crowd, he smiles, satisfied at the thought of having participated in the quintessential Santorini experience.