Ancient Magnificence: A Photographic Journey Through Ancient Akrotiri

On a clear, sunny morning in early October, I made my way from Fira, the iconic Mediterranean Greek island of Santorini’s largest town situated along the precipice of the Thera caldera. I traveled south to the location of the archaeological remains of Akrotiri. Though its remains hug the edge of land and ocean, it is now housed within a modern construction created specifically to protect the site from the elements. What archaeologists have revealed here represents only a fraction of what once constituted the entire settlement, but even so, it leaves a jaw-dropping impression of an ancient people who thrived in this place in abundance well over 3,000 years ago. It would be no exaggeration to say that this ancient city could be described as the Pompeii of Bronze Age Greece. Devastated during the massive eruption of the Thera volcano in the 16th century BCE, like the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in present-day Italy many centuries later, it was destroyed yet miraculously preserved, as if frozen in time. Excavated thousands of years after the Thera eruption, it has joined the world’s short-list of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of all time.

Santorini is anciently known as Thera, and today it hosts an estimated 2 million visitors a year. As an island in the southern Aegean Sea, it lies about 120 miles southeast of the Greek mainland. It is the largest island within an archipelago of the Cyclades, a group of islands south of Greece and north of Crete. It is best known for its volcanic history, and the great, water-filled caldera that bestows the location its defining characteristic. It is also known for its many attractions as a tourist destination, but perhaps most fascinating of all are the incredible archaeological remains of the nearly 7,000-year-old maritime settlement of Akrotiri, the center of a Cycladic civilization that flourished most prominently during the 16th century BCE. Trade relations established with other Aegean cultures and civilizations that ringed the Mediterranean proved to be the engine of its growth, especially that of the copper trade. It became an important center for processing copper, based on the artifacts discovered at the site. The city prospered as a major center for at least 500 years. Excavations have revealed—along with thousands of artifacts—paved streets, an extensive drainage system, sophisticated pottery, and a masterful array of some of the earliest fresco wall paintings of the Bronze Age. In fact, the culture of Akrotiri was so sophisticated for its time that some historians and scholars have attributed the ancient city as a possible historic basis for the later legend of Plato’s lost Atlantis. The city came to its end between 1620 and 1530 BCE with the eruption of the Thera volcano.

What follows is a photographic pictorial from the perspective of a typical visitor’s walk-through of the site. The sun’s rays penetrated the enveloping open structure that protected the remains—houses, apartments, public administrative buildings, religious spaces—providing an interesting flow of beaming light over many of the site’s details….

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