Santorini

• 1. Introduction

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  Santorini, officially called Thira or Thera, is a Greek island in the southern Aegean Sea, about 200 km southeast of the mainland. Roughly 3,600 years ago, one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history struck the island at the height of the Minoan civilization. The blast left a huge water-filled caldera, rimmed by ash deposits hundreds of metres deep.

  Santorini is the biggest piece of the small circular archipelago that surrounds that flooded crater, and the southernmost member of the Cyclades. It covers about 73 sq km, and its 2021 census counted 15,480 people. The wider municipality also takes in Therasia and several uninhabited islands, including Nea Kameni, Palaia Kameni, Aspronisi, Anydros, and Christiana, for a total land area of 90 sq km.

  What machinery under the Aegean keeps building and breaking this place? What did a Bronze Age town look like when ash sealed it? Why has the island carried so many names? And how do people farm, find water, and build homes on ground that refuses to stay still?

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• 2. Engine Under the Aegean

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  Southwest of Crete, the oceanic crust of the northern African Plate is sliding beneath Greece and the Aegean Sea. This Hellenic subduction zone drives the Hellenic arc, a line of volcanic centres that includes Methana, Milos, Kos, and Santorini. Of these, Santorini is the most active centre in the South Aegean Volcanic Arc, a belt about 500 km long and 20 to 40 km wide.

  Volcanic activity in the region began 3 to 4 million years ago. On Thera itself it started about 2 million years ago, when dacitic lavas emerged from vents around Akrotiri.

  A small older island, about 9 by 6 km, lies buried inside the volcano's foundations. Its rock is mostly metamorphosed limestone and schist, and it still shows at places such as Mesa Vouno, Pyrgos, and Monolithos.

  At least twelve large explosive eruptions have shaped Santorini, and at least four of them formed calderas. The earliest, mostly underwater, took place on the Akrotiri Peninsula between 650,000 and 550,000 years ago. Over the past 360,000 years the volcano has run through two major cycles, each ending with two caldera-forming blasts.

  Each cycle works like a slow trap. Lava flows and small explosions build cones, and those cones are thought to block magma from reaching the surface. Trapped magma collects in large chambers and grows richer in silica. Eventually a huge explosion destroys the cone. The rhyolitic magma at the end of a cycle produces the most explosive eruptions, while the island's products overall range from basalt to rhyolite.

  Today the inner edge of the caldera is a sheer drop of more than 300 m at its highest. Layers of solidified lava are stacked in plain view, and the main towns perch on the crest. The outer slopes run gently down to smooth, shallow beaches. Their sand takes its colour from whichever layer is exposed, which explains the Red Beach, the Black Beach, and the White Beach. Water at the darker beaches is noticeably warmer because the lava absorbs heat.

  The Kameni islands in the middle of the lagoon are the newest cones. The first broke the surface in 197 BC, and nine eruptions above water have been recorded since. In 1707 an undersea volcano surfaced to form Nea Kameni, and the last eruption there ended in 1950. The current crater still gives off steam and carbon dioxide.

  Between January 2011 and April 2012, small tremors and strange gaseous smells led to satellite radar analysis. It showed that 10 to 20 million cubic metres of molten rock had swollen the magma chamber, lifting parts of the island by a reported 8 to 14 centimetres. Scientists compared that surge to 20 years of regular activity.

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• 3. The Great Eruption

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  A small island just north of today's Nea Kameni sat at the centre of the caldera when the Minoan eruption began. Before that day the caldera formed an almost unbroken ring, with its only entrance between Aspronisi and Thera. The blast wiped out the ring between Aspronisi and Therasia and between Therasia and Thera, opening two new channels.

  On Santorini, a layer of white tephra up to 60 m thick buries the soil that marked ground level before the eruption. It divides into three fairly distinct bands, which record different phases of the event. The eruption lasted for weeks and caused massive tsunami waves.

  Work by an international team of scientists in 2006 forced a rethink of the scale. Estimates in 1991 had put the material thrown out at 39 km3. The new figure was 61 km3 of magma and rock, producing an estimated 100 km3 of tephra. Only the Tambora eruption of 1815, the Taupo eruption of 181 AD, and possibly the Baekdu Mountain eruption of 946 AD put more material into the atmosphere during the past 5,000 years.

  A date of around 1500 BC, long favoured by archaeologists, now clashes with the science. That figure came from the established sequence of Bronze Age Mediterranean cultures. Radiocarbon dating points instead to 1645-1600 BC, and tree ring data gives 1628 BC. Because evidence of the eruption appears throughout the Aegean, it serves as a fixed point for the chronology of the second millennium BC, which makes the disagreement matter. The older culture-based chronology has generally been questioned as a result.

  Atlantis and the Exodus are the two ancient stories most often tied to this eruption. Geologist Barbara J. Sivertsen argues for a causal link with the plagues of the Exodus in her book The Parting of the Sea: How Volcanoes, Earthquakes, and Plagues Shaped the Exodus Story. Current archaeological research does not support the content of these stories, though they remain popular in pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology.

  Beneath that thick white layer, a Bronze Age town at Akrotiri lay sealed and waiting.

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• 4. Akrotiri Preserved

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  In 1967, Spyridon Marinatos began excavating at Akrotiri, and the dig made Thera the best-known Minoan site outside Crete, the culture's homeland. Only the southern tip of a large town has been uncovered. Even so, it has revealed multi-level buildings, streets, and squares, with walls standing as high as eight metres. Many houses rise three storeys, and many stone staircases are still intact.

  The town was not a palace complex like those on Crete, and it was not a cluster of merchant warehouses. Fine masonry and wall paintings point to a complex community. A loom workshop suggests organised weaving of textiles for export. Houses hold huge ceramic storage jars called pithoi, along with mills and pottery.

  The frescoes kept their original colour because many metres of ash protected them. One house holds two antelopes drawn with a confident, calligraphic line, a man carrying fish strung by their gills, a flotilla of pleasure boats escorted by leaping dolphins, and women sitting in the shade of light canopies. Fragments from another site show saffron gatherers offering crocus stamens to a seated woman, perhaps a goddess important to this culture. These themes bear no relationship to the typical Classical Greek decor, which showed the gods of the Greek pantheon.

  The oldest pipes with running water and water closets ever discovered come from this town. The pipes ran in twin systems, which suggests that residents used both hot and cold supplies. The hot water probably had a geothermal source, given the volcano next door.

  Between about 2000 and 1650 BC, Akrotiri grew into one of the Aegean's major Bronze Age ports. Objects recovered there came from Crete, Anatolia, Cyprus, Syria, Egypt, the Dodecanese, and the Greek mainland. The oldest signs of settlement are Late Neolithic, from the fourth millennium BC or earlier.

  Visitors often compare the ruins to Pompeii in Italy. In September 2005, the canopy covering the ruins collapsed, killing one tourist and injuring seven. The site stayed closed until April 2012, while a new canopy was built.

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• 5. Colonists, Names, and Conquerors

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  Ancient writers said the island was first called Kallístē, meaning the most beautiful one. A modern tradition adds Strongýlē, the circular one. The name Thera honours Theras, the leader of the Spartans who colonized the island and gave it his name. It was revived in the nineteenth century as the official name. The popular name Santorini is a contraction of Saint Irene, after an old church in the village of Perissa. The geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi recorded it around 1154 as Santurin, and the island has carried it since at least the middle of the twelfth century.

  After the eruption, Santorini stayed unoccupied for the rest of the Bronze Age. Probably after the Bronze Age collapse, Phoenicians founded a site there. According to Herodotus, they called the island Callista and lived on it for eight generations. In the ninth century BC, Dorians founded the main Hellenic city on Mesa Vouno, 396 m above sea level. Today that city is called Ancient Thera.

  In the third century BC, Apollonius Rhodius wrote the Argonautica in Hellenistic Egypt, and it includes a founding myth for the island. In Libya, the god Triton hands the Argonaut Euphemus, a son of Poseidon, a clod of dirt. Euphemus carries it close to his heart for several days, then dreams that it becomes a woman named Calliste, a daughter of Triton. She tells him to throw the dirt into the sea, where it will grow into an island for his descendants. The poem says the island was named Thera after his descendant Theras, son of Autesion, who led refugee settlers from Lemnos.

  Large inscriptions cut into stone near the temple of Apollo were found by Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen. They attest to relationships between the Dorian authors and their young lovers. Their size, careful construction, and in some cases the use of craftsmen other than the authors lead some archaeologists to see them as ritual and celebratory.

  Herodotus reports that after a drought of seven years, Thera sent out colonists who founded cities in northern Africa, including Cyrene. In the fifth century BC, Dorian Thera did not join the Delian League with Athens. During the Peloponnesian War it sided with Dorian Sparta. Athens took the island during the war but lost it again after the Battle of Aegospotami. After the death of Alexander the Great, the island joined the Ptolemaic kingdom and became a major base for the Ptolemaic navy.

  Rome ruled next, and when the Roman Empire divided, the island passed to the eastern half known today as the Byzantine Empire. In the summer of 727, the tenth year of the reign of Leo III the Isaurian, the volcano erupted again, according to George Cedrenus. He wrote that "a vapour like an oven's fire boiled up for days out of the middle of the islands of Thera and Therasia." People read the terrifying blaze as a divine omen against the worship of religious icons. It gave the emperor the justification he needed to begin his policy of Iconoclasm.

  After the Fourth Crusade, the Duchy of Naxos occupied the island until about 1280, when Licario reconquered it. Around 1301, Iacopo II Barozzi, from the Cretan branch of a Venetian family, took it from the Byzantines. Around 1335, Niccolo Sanudo annexed it to Venice. Turkish principalities Menteshe and Aydın raided in 1318-1331 and 1345-1360 but did little damage. Because of the Venetians, the island has a sizable Catholic community and is still the seat of a Catholic bishopric.

  In 1576, the Ottoman admiral Piyale Pasha captured Santorini as part of the annexation of most remaining Latin possessions in the Aegean. It became part of the semi-autonomous domain of Joseph Nasi, the sultan's Jewish favourite. Even with no Muslims living there, the island suffered Venetian raids during the frequent Ottoman-Venetian wars of the 17th century. Russians under Alexey Orlov briefly captured it during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, but it returned to Ottoman control.

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• 6. Revolt and Occupation

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  In 1807, the Sublime Porte forced islanders to send 50 sailors to Mykonos to serve in the Ottoman navy. By 1810, Santorini's 32 ships made up the seventh largest fleet in Greece, behind Hydra with 120, Kefallinia with 118, Psara and Spetsai with 60 each, Ithaca with 38, and Skopelos with 35. Most residents were farmers and seafarers who exported their produce. The Monastery of Profitis Ilias was one of the most important monastic centres in the Cyclades. In 1821 the island had 13,235 inhabitants, and within a year that number rose to 15,428.

  Early in 1821, Alexandros Ypsilantis, head of the Filiki Eteria, sent Dimitrios Themelis from Patmos and Evangelis Matzarakis to build a network of supporters in the Cyclades. Matzarakis was a sea captain from Kefalonia with Santorini connections. He carried a letter dated the 29th of December 1820, addressed to the notables of Santorini and to the Orthodox metropolitan bishop Zacharias Kyriakos.

  The island was divided. Some islanders backed independence, but many Catholics and non-Orthodox distrusted a revolt directed from Hydra and Spetses, or feared the sultan's revenge. On the 5th of May 1821, the feast day of the island's patron saint, Matzarakis enlisted Kefalonians living on Santorini to raise the flag of the revolution and expel the Ottoman officials.

  In April 1822, the Provisional Administration of Greece made Santorini one of six Aegean provinces and appointed Matzarakis its governor. He raised double the money collected on Naxos, yet he lacked diplomatic skill. Islanders who had enjoyed considerable autonomy resisted direction from a central authority. They could not see why they should pay higher taxes than under the Ottomans. Matzarakis told his superiors that they needed "political re-education." Many tax collectors resigned.

  His authoritarian character and arbitrary arrests cost him the support of Zacharias Kyriakos. Matzarakis accused the archbishop of being a "Turkophile," imprisoned him, and then exiled him. Abbots, priests, and prelates complained to Demetrios Ypsilantis, president of the National Assembly. Matzarakis had to hire bodyguards as the island rose against him. He fled and was dismissed, though he later represented Santorini in the National Assembly. After his death, Pantoleon Augerino succeeded him in that post in November 1824.

  News of the massacres on Chios in April 1822 spread fear of Ottoman reprisals. Two villages said they were ready to surrender, while sixteen monks of Profitis Ilias, led by their abbot Gerasimos Mavrommatis, declared their support for the revolt in writing. When four commissioners arrived in July 1822, the island's notables arrested one of them, Konstantinos Metaxas, planning to hand him to the Ottomans to prove their loyalty. His Ionian guards rescued him. In October 1822, Antonios Barbarigos, who had served in the First National Assembly at Epidaurus, was seriously wounded in the head by a knife attack during a factional dispute.

  In early 1823, the Second National Assembly at Astros imposed a contribution of 90,000 grosis on Santorini. The island became part of the fledgling Greek state under the London Protocol of the 3rd of February 1830. It rebelled against the government of Ioannis Kapodistrias in 1831, and it became definitively part of the Kingdom of Greece in 1832 under the Treaty of Constantinople. On the 1st of February 1862, Santorini joined an insurrection that began in Nafplio against King Otto. Royal authorities restored control by the 20th of March, but unrest returned and led to the revolution of the 23rd of October 1862, which overthrew him.

  Italian forces occupied Santorini in 1941, and the Germans took over after the Italian armistice in 1943. In 1944, British Special Boat Service commandos raided the German garrison and killed most of its men. Five locals, including the mayor, were shot in reprisal.

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• 7. Shaken Ground

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  At 05:11 local time on the 9th of July 1956, the Amorgos earthquake struck 30 km south of the island of Amorgos, about 50 km from Santorini. Studies put its magnitude between 7.5 and 7.8, making it the largest earthquake of the 20th century in Greece. Thirteen minutes later, at 05:24, an aftershock of magnitude 7.2 hit near the island of Anafi. It is believed to have caused most of the damage and casualties on Santorini.

  A tsunami accompanied the quakes, and it is estimated to have reached 3 metres at Perissa and 2 metres at Vlichada. Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis declared a "large-scale local disaster" and visited on the 14th of July. Greece turned down an offer of warships from the United Kingdom, whose ships were busy in Cyprus with the Cyprus Emergency. With no airport on the island, the Greek military dropped food, tents, and supplies from the air, and camps for homeless people were set up on the outskirts of Fira.

  The earthquakes killed 53 people on Santorini and injured another 100. In all, 529 houses were destroyed, 1,482 were severely damaged, and 1,750 were lightly damaged. Almost all public buildings were completely destroyed. The newly built Hotel Atlantis survived unscathed, so it served as a temporary hospital and housed public services. The worst damage was along the western edge of the caldera, especially at Oia, where parts of the ground collapsed into the sea. Extreme poverty pushed many people to leave, and most settled in Athens.

  About the 27th of January 2025, a swarm of earthquakes began in the Aegean Sea north-east of Santorini, and it intensified after the 1st of February. More than 200 undersea tremors were detected over the weekend of the 1st and the 2nd of February. They clustered between Santorini, Anafi, Amorgos, Ios, and the uninhabited islet of Anydros, and many exceeded magnitude 4.5. The strongest came on the 10th of February. Experts at the time considered the quakes tectonic rather than volcanic. Seismologist Manolis Skordylis said on public radio that an activated fault line could produce an earthquake above magnitude 6.0.

  Greek authorities sent emergency crews, including a 26-member rescue team with a rescue dog. Schools closed on Santorini, Anafi, Amorgos, and Ios, and access to areas near cliffs was restricted because of landslide risk. Fira received several evacuation gathering points, and residents were told to move inland from shorelines and the old port because of tsunami risk. Hotels were told to drain their swimming pools to limit structural damage. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, speaking in Brussels, called for calm. Aegean Airlines doubled its flights between Athens and Santorini for two days, and ferry companies added services. Around 6,000 residents left by ferry from the 2nd of February, and up to 2,700 left by air on the 3rd and 4th, so roughly 9,000 of a population near 15,500 departed.

  The government declared a state of emergency on the 6th of February, and it was lifted on the 3rd of March. The earthquakes declined after mid-February, and the crisis ended in late February. Turkey's disaster agency AFAD and its mineral research directorate MTA had warned that the quakes could lead to volcanic activity around the Kolumbo submarine volcano off Santorini. Later analysis of earthquakes and ground deformation was consistent with a 30 km long volcanic dyke being emplaced beneath the seabed, pointing to a deep intrusion of magma.

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• 8. Life on the Ash

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  Rooms called hypóskapha are the island's unique architectural signature. They are extensions of houses dug sideways or downwards into the surrounding pumice. The air-filled pumice insulates so well that these rooms stay cool in summer and warm in winter. They also serve as premium storage, especially for wine in the Kánava wineries. Above ground, low cubical houses of local stone are whitewashed or limewashed, and various volcanic ashes now supply colours that increasingly replace white. Underground dwellings along the caldera ridge, where unstable soil made damage worse, had to be evacuated after 1956.

  In the 15th and 16th centuries, pirates plundered the harvests of the Cyclades and sold captives in slave markets. Islanders responded by building settlements at the highest, most inaccessible points, packed close together, with windowless outer walls forming a protective perimeter. Five casteli, large fortified permanent settlements, stood at Agios Nikolaos near Oia, Akrotiri, Emborio, Pyrgos, and Skaros. Each had a church of Agia Theodosia at its entrance. Four goulas, from the Turkish word kule, meaning tower, served as observatory and refuge, with thick walls, parapets, an iron gate, and murder holes. Viglio, small coastal watchtowers, were permanently garrisoned to raise the alarm when a pirate ship appeared.

  Santorini has only one spring, Zoodochos Pigi, the Life-giving Spring. The island lies in a rain shadow between the mountains of Crete and the Peloponnese, receives about 270 mm of rain a year, and has no rivers. Islanders channelled rain from roofs and courtyards into elaborate underground cisterns. The scarcity favoured vines and olives that survive on the dew from early-morning fog. Tourism outgrew rainwater harvesting, so desalination plants now supply running but non-potable water to most residents, and many historic cisterns have fallen into disrepair. The first plant, at Oia, followed a donation in 1992 by the Oia-born businessman Aristeidis Alafouzos. By 2020 it had six units with a total capacity of 2,800 m3 per day.

  The old vines of Santorini needed no replacement during the great phylloxera epidemic of the late 19th century. Local winemakers credit the well-drained volcanic soil and its chemistry. Because dew is their main source of moisture, the vines are planted far apart and often trained into low spiralling baskets, with the grapes hanging inside to shelter from the wind. The main grape is Assyrtiko, joined by Athiri and Aidani among whites and Mavrotragano and Mandilaria among reds. Vinsanto, meaning holy wine, is made from the best sun-dried grapes and aged in barrel for up to twenty or twenty-five years for top bottlings. It matures into a dark, amber-orange dessert wine with aromas of citrus, minerals, nuts, raisins, figs, honey, and tea. Yields run at only 10 to 20 percent of those common in France or California. In the middle of the 19th century, Santorini exported all of its wine to Russia.

  In 1954, Santorini had about 12,000 inhabitants and very few visitors. Transport meant a jeep, a small bus, and the island's traditional donkeys and mules. Early 1950s visitors were small numbers of wealthy yacht passengers, and island children lit small lanterns along the steps from Fira down to the port as a farewell. The actress Olivia de Havilland visited in September 1955 at the invitation of Petros Nomikos. Around the same time, the shipping magnate Evangelos P. Nomikos and his wife Loula asked residents whether they wanted the couple to pay for a hotel or a hospital, and local authorities chose the hotel.

  An estimated 2 million tourists now visit each year, and many magazines and travel sites, including Travel+Leisure, the BBC, and US News, have ranked Santorini the world's top island. The pumice quarries have been closed since 1986 to preserve the caldera. In 2007 the cruise ship MS Sea Diamond ran aground and sank inside it. By 2019 the island had become popular with Asian couples who come for pre-wedding photos against the landscape.

  The Santorini Film Festival is held every year at the open-air Cinema Kamari. A board game called Santorini, inspired by the architecture of the cliffside villages, was published in 2004 by Gordon Hamilton.

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