The lost world of Atlantis
1998

Early in the morning, looking out over the perfect water, the wind blowing at the mist on the heights (this was June), the water exactly as Homer described it, truly wine-dark, impossible not to think of one of mankind's earliest and most persistent myths: paradise lost. For Christianity, it is the Garden of Eden, and for the Egyptians and Greeks, the Happy Isle, the lost civilisation of Atlantis, and on Santorini – or Thira, to give it its older name – it is easy to imagine, some hundreds of fathoms beneath the cruise ships and the eager tourists, the drowned temples and houses of a great Minoan culture.

That contact with what is lost is alone worth the voyage, for progress is very much a recent notion, and for most of our history we reflected more on what we had lost than on what we might gain; the past was superior to the present; there was ever a golden age, and it always preceded our present corrupt times.

Well, Santorini has its discos and its brawling, drunken tourists, its sputtering motorbikes and its few cars, its share of corruption – fishermen who don't fish and artisans who don't create – but much remains of what was, and the rest one can imagine. Imagination is a far more vital travel companion than an American Express Card.
For instance, the round island before its middle collapsed; the culture related by Plato and Solon and reported by the priests of Egypt; its destruction by the giant volcanic eruption in 1520 BC; the great tidal wave that washed away the Minoan civilisation on Crete and swept as far as the Egyptian shore; the ascription of the tragedy to human transgression and divine revenge. Myths are not created about places of no consequence.

Arrivals, alas are more modern and less imaginative. The best way to arrive would undoubtedly be by sea; we flew in from Athens, a half-hour journey as against a long day on one of the innumerable ferries that criss-cross between Piraeus and the Cyclades islands. But the passage through the red and streaked black cliffs between Oia and the neighbouring island of Thirasia, a deep and narrow channel created by the collapse of the volcano's rim, is spectacular, magical even.

The actual arrival, at Port Antinios, looks as perfunctory as our landfall at the airport. Off troop one contingent of island-hopping students, mainlanders and islanders and small-time businessmen (the latter looking seedy and Levantine as if, complete with cardboard suitcases and sweat-rimmed hats, they had just stepped from an early novel by Eric Ambler) and another troops on. For them the same taxis that awaited us, to climb up the dizzying pumice and lava cliffs by hairpins to the plateau on top.

For some obscure reason, most flights to Santorini leave Athens, when they do leave and when they are on time, in the dark hours of the night. There is nothing romantic about midnight at a military airport, plastered with admonitory "Do not photograph" signs. The first we saw of Santorini was a Greek conscript on duty, his sub-machinegun slung, the current posture of soldiers everywhere, like a third arm in a sling, as he looked on impassively.

After disembarking, one walks over to the perimeter fence, and awaits the baggage train, which simply stops by the gate, producing a voluble free-for-all and not a few wrenched suitcase handles and furious arguments.
The gateway itself is crowded with taxi drivers and hotel touts: the taxi you will need; the touts we can all do without. We at least had a booking; the rest of the passengers melted into the darkness – in packages, into buses or individually, into the unknown.

Arriving cold, I suspect, must be a trial. How near the beach is the "Beach Hotel"? Where the hell is Imerovigli, and is it more desirable than Vothonas? (Answer, yes). In fact, there may be 50 hotels on the island, but there are only four major options as a base for exploration. If you are into beaches, the choice is truly limited. There are a few tiny coves scattered around the island, but these lack amenities of any sort, and the only proper beach is at Perissa, a long curve of black sand on the east coast with the appropriate campsite, a half-dozen pleasant and hospitable tavernas, the same number of small hotels, innumerable bed and breakfast houses, a couple of scattered discos and not much else.

Kamari is where the packages cluster. It is villa Greece with a vengeance and lies on the flat and fertile east coast. It has a narrow, two-kilometre beach, but a tedious topography. On the other hand, it is a pure holiday and family place: spanking new. Handsomely built in the traditional style, self-contained and boasting the only sports facilities (tennis) on the island. It was built after the destructive 1956 earthquake.

At the northern end of the island is Oia, a little gem of Cycladic architecture, all cubes and domes and vaulted rooms carved into the cliffs, there is bit too much of national trust preservationism about the absoluteness of the blue-and-white motifs, but I can happily report that we did see one house – obviously belonging to a natural rebel – with green shutters and lintels, and some of the older houses still show a distinctive Italianate style, with little wrought-iron balconies and tiny flowering forecourts.

The main town, 300 metres below which the cruise ships anchor, is Fira or Thira, which is where we stayed in Theoxenia Hotel. Almost daily we watched the ships circle in the caldera and anchor, the lighters come alongside, and the tourists wend their way up towards us: by donkey or mule, the adventurous, up a cobbled, slick, winding set of steps; on foot, the fit; and by cable car the vast majority.

Given its small size, Fira is remarkably complete. Besides its hotels and its several dozen restaurants, it has just about everything anyone could want. The Independent arrived daily, as did all the major European papers.

Buses connect Fira with the rest of the island, and there was blessedly little of that aggressive tourist soliciting which soils so many Greek islands. One did more or less what one wanted. All Fira lacks is a beach. Or even a single pool (water is scarce).

Be warned, however. Santorini is a hill civilisation, and wearying. Apart from two or three paved roads, it is more fit for donkeys and walking than for a pushchair.

If you have a refractory almost-toddler who has been bored by Athens and likes only the cucumber in Greek salads, who generally finds mangy dogs more interesting and accessible than the tourist legs that gather about him, who dislikes the hat he is required to wear and understands not distant views, however splendid, and sees the sea more as a bigger-than-usual drink of water than as Atlantis, Fira is not the place for you. Go to Kamari.

The solution of course is a car. What most people rent is a little open Suzuki jeep. It doesn't go above 30 mph, but that is ample: especially considering the plaster-of-Paris biker we saw being carted, rigid, onto the plane on which he had just arrived – he had tried to go faster. The horror stories are plentiful: "There", the locals are likely to point out, showing a sheer cliff minus any guard rail, "a nice French family." And we were told of one German biker who went off a cliffside, drunk, fell some 500-feet, and walked into a church, still not sure why he wasn't on the road.

Still, do not be deterred. A jeep gives you freedom, it is guaranteed to fascinate the child, and it takes you where you list, tanning (especially the knees) all the while: to the beaches, to ancient Byzantine churches, isolated farmhouses, to deserted rocky coves, to the lighthouse at one end and to a culture, buried deep, almost everywhere. The universality of ruins, it was explained, accounts for the lack of overbuilding, and hence the beauty of the island. One doesn't just buy land and put up a house: should there be a shard of pottery or a busted column under the ground, much less a limbless god or a votive offering, you may not build.

The essence of Santorini you can grasp in a day, it's all laid out for you. To discover the layers of history underlying one small island, at least a week is needed.

I don't know how you feel about archaeological digs in progress, but I am one of those who think it must be more fun to dig than to look. True, at Akrotiri one can get a fair impression of a once-upon-a-time Bronze Age city, then a Minoan: narrow streets not unlike those of Fira, hearths, the occasional wall-painting (removed). But the prevailing impression is of dust and dusty guardians, and the miraculous consists, again, only in the imagin-ation. As neither skeletons nor jewels have been found, it is surmised that the inhabitants were forewarned of the imminent eruption and took off. But where to? And how? Did they all perish in the great tidal wave? During the 1956 earthquake, casualties were few. The locals say that they were forewarned by their animals, ever-sensitive – having four feet on the ground – to the slightest tremor.

According to Herodotus, the Phoenicians resettled the island from 1330 BC until 1115 BC, when the Dorians conquered it, leaving their tablets and funeral urns in Archaia Thira, on the slopes of the island's most prominent landmark, Mesa Vouno. This is now capped by a later god, the television relay tower. The best remains have of course been carted off to Athens. A few remain, honouring the German archaeologist, Hiller von Gaertringen, who found them, in the island's desperately modest museum.

The island was then Hellenistic until the Roman occupation in 146 BC and christianised by the fifth century AD or possibly earlier. So much history, you might say, but is it an especial pleasure of Santorini. All these many layers, and the subsequent overlay of Byzantine, the occupation by the Norman dukes of Naxos, the domination of Venice (hence Santorini, or St Irene's) and finally of the Ottomans, cohabit within such a small space and are so visible, and so tangible.

My early-morning walks, for instance, took me up a cobbled main street which was also a progress through history, winding up in a Dominican nunnery founded in 1596 and co-existing cheerfully, as rarely the Eastern and Roman churches did elsewhere, with its Greek Orthodox companion a kilometre further up in Imerovigli. In the same cluster of buildings are both the cathedral, containing church below church, and the Megaron Ghyzis Cultural Centre.

The grouping is important as the physical manifestation of an intimate fact of Santorini life: the profound educational force of the Churches (both Roman and Orthodox) during the long Turkish occupation. The Cultural Centre had a hodge-podge of curios on view while we were there: ancient deeds and documents in splendid cursive Greek, early maps of the island, dramatic engravings of the 1866–70 eruptions on the little island of Nea Kaimeni from the Illustrated London News and tragic, blurred black-and-white photographs of the 1956 earthquake. Between days at Perissa, nattering to a young Glaswegian contentedly renting beach chairs and umbrellas and married to a local of great charm and emaciation – they run a bed and breakfast place called Anna's – and leisurely lunches of spicy mullet in tomato sauce, and drives about the island, culture and shopping, and long, late meals at night, we had more than enough to keep ourselves busy without even bothering with the discos, whose music anyway infiltrated our balconied suite until two in the morning.

Then, just before dawn, another day would begin as I awoke to the sound of mules plopping along with their drovers, freighted down with firewood or cargo, and set off for the bus stop on the main road to breakfast on strong coffee and apple strudel.

Though I find Greek food unimaginative, the variety of establishments offering more or less the same fare is quite diverting, and the prices, for an ample scoff, very reasonable.

We finally settled on two restaurants: one, the Selene, built into the hillside of Fira, beyond its one four-star hotel (which looked painfully proper), with a breathtaking view, quite up-market and civilised; and a plain taverna down a side street with a sweating cook constantly forking lamb and squid onto an open fire and, as the throngs walked by, shouting up to the street, "Yes please, come in!" Eating fish, however, is expensive; restaurants price it by weight, so to avoid a nasty shock when presented with the bill get your fish weighed before it is cooked. The fish is almost all imported from the mainland; the only fishing done on Santorini is for tourists. I add that the local Santorini wine (once widely reputed) is, in both its red and white versions, better than average. The best available is the Boutari.

Jewellery, the usual rag-trade summer clothes, trendy pottery, museum reproductions, smelly leather, some quite tasteful toys and handicrafts, slightly better than usual souvenir paintings – all that we turned down in favour of two quite splendid huge tablecloths with 12 napkins each. We are probably untypical, for gold is cheap in Greece and the designs, though imitations of a long-gone splendour, are not without their qualities.

Ultimately, the pleasures of Santorini will depend on you. Extroverts and birds of passage in their plumage of backpack and walkman abound, but just as the locals are serene and surviving and cheerful, so I suspect are those who will truly appreciate the island. It is somehow introverted and timeless, with too much to look back on and only tourists to look forward to. Just the place for those who like to amble, think, drink, eat, read, loll and imagine.