Santorini - 2022

 

Santorini has changed a lot since I first visited it fifty-four years ago.  It is now one of the most glamorous and visited islands on planet earth.

The views of the Caldera from the patios of elegant hotels is stunning.

The 3-hour trek between Fira and Oia presents a most beautiful scenery.

Santorini has become the place where young persons from far away places such as the United States or China elect to give vows of everlasting love and devotion. 

On this visit I stayed in the lovely hotel Phaos, which patio overlooks the the islands of Anafi and Astypalea in the Aegean Sea.

As in my first visit in 1968, I visited once more Akrotiri the Bronze Age settlement, one of the most important Minoan urban centres in the Aegean Sea, when it was covered by ash following the volcanic eruption in the 17 century BC.  The ancient Minoan town at Santorini's south coast, is called the "Pompeii of Greece" and some archeologists theorise that it is the fictional island of Atlantis that was created by demi-gods who established a utopian society as described by Greek philosopher Plato. 

I am finishing the trilogy on Santorini with the lighthouse in its southern tip, likely the oldest in Greece, as it was built in 1892.  It was the purpose of my first visit to service it and my role as a young Navy physician to check the health status of its crew.  The view was beautiful then, like it is now, thus a large number of visitors keep coming in the evenings to look at the sun setting.  Each of my trips to Santorini left me with beautiful and indelible memories which I will cherish the rest of my life. 

Santorini - 1988

 
I returned to Santorini 20 years after my first visit.  At that time the construction had begun in earnest.  On the left you can see the spire and dome of the Catholic Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist and on the right, the Candlemas Orthodox Cathedral was under reconstruction.

Before my trip to Santorini, we baptised my firstborn son on April 23, the feast day of Saint George, in the little chapel on mount Lycabetus in Athens.  A rare storm had blown by earlier resulting in a crystal clear Spring day with deep blue skies, we thus had a beautiful view of Athens and its nearby islands.

In the evening of our arrival in Santorini, I went out for a walk in the little town of Fira.  It was cold and windy as on my first visit 20 years before. It was after sunset, a light rain had started and I was walking alone.  At one point another person was walking the opposite direction towards me. He was wearing a black raincoat and a hat with a wide flat rim similar to the one of Don Quixote.  He was the Monseigneur of the Catholic Cathedral which was originally built in 1823 and restored in 1970.  The picture above is how the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist looks today.  

Santorini - 1968

 I visited Santorini for the first time in 1968 while I was serving in the Greek Navy.  It was a stormy day something which is not unusual for the Cycladitic islands known for their strong winds.  We anchored by the southernmost cape called Akrotiri.  

At that time tourists had just discovered this unique island and some visited it on mules or donkeys.  

I visited the island on foot.  The most important site then was, as it is now, the Bronze age city Akrotiri.

Akrotiri became known due to the excavations conducted under the supervision of the archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos in 1967.  I was lucky that Professor Marinatos was on the site at the time of my visit and gave me a tour of the ancient city that was covered completely during the volcanic explosion more that three millennia ago.  It is few times in our lives that we meet in person eminent individuals like him. 

Navigation by the Ancients

Ancient mariners knew that the sea is large and getting lost was easy especially if someone ventured out far from the coast.  So how did ancient navigators, like the Polynesians, found their way and guided their boats on the intended course across vast oceans to safe harbors?    

Ancient navigators used local knowledge and lore to guide them.  Such knowledge was amassed from fanciful narrations of sailors who upon their return spoke about distant lands, monsters and of people they met.    

The logbooks and diaries aboard a sailboat recorded everything from how long it took to travel between two sites, and the routes they took were drawn on extremely valuable and often illustrated maps.  A reliable method to fixing one’s position was and still is by monitoring depth soundings. Herodotus in the fourth century BC said “when you get 11 fathoms on the lead you are one day’s distance from Alexandria”.  We used depth soundings in our crossing of the strait of Bonifacio when we got close to the island of Magdalena north of Sardinia.

In antiquity as today sailors were familiar with seasonal variations, prevailing winds and wave patterns of the seas near the lands they lived.  They Minoans were pioneers of long-distance travel as seen in the sixteen-century BC mural found in the island of Santorini.  They took advantage of the strong northerly wind Meltemi that blows daily in the Aegean during the summer months that propelled them to Crete and as far as Egypt.     

The first seafarers followed the land or sailed to nearby islands thus navigators depended on coastal navigation.  The most celebrated of the Ancient Sailors was the Greek Pytheas who left from Marseille in 325 BC sailed to the British Isles, Scandinavia, Baltic Sea and Thule that it was likely Iceland or even North America.  

Ptolemy a second century Greek mathematician, astronomer and geographer assigned coordinates of latitude and longitude to as many as 8,000 geographic locations.  His atlas was carved initially on wooden blocks.  While a recent publication of his work was on the 1482 edition of Geographia.