Incredible supernatural energy, the other SANTORINI

With pristine white buildings perched on rugged terrain overlooking the Aegean Sea, it’s practically impossible to find an angle of Santorini that isn’t photogenic. Tucked away at the southern tip of Santorini are the ruins of one of the Bronze age’s most sophisticated settlements, which prospered for centuries before being eradicated by a great volcanic eruption.

In the 17th century B.C., Santorini was a small volcanic island in the Aegean Sea, home to Akrotiri, a Late Bronze Age outpost of Minoan civilization, which preceded ancient Greece. Then the volcano erupted, burying Akrotiri in ash and obliterating much of Santorini, turning it into a few smaller islands. The eruption was one of the world’s most powerful in the past 10,000 years, spewing some 20 cubic miles of rock into the skies and spawning a tsunami that struck the nearby island of Crete, which was the center of Minoan culture. Many archaeologists believe the tsunami was disruptive enough that the Minoans became easier prey for the outside invaders who conquered them a century and a half later and brought an end to one of the first European civilizations.

Like the Roman ruins of Pompeii, the remains of the Minoan town of Akrotiri are remarkably well-preserved.

The settlement was all but obliterated in the middle of the second millennium BC, when the volcano it sat upon, Thera, erupted, and its inhabitants fled. The volcanic matter enveloped the entire island of Santorini and the town itself, preserving the buildings and their contents, and visitors can still identify houses and pots.

Unlike Pompeii, no human remains have been found at Akrotiri, and only one gold object was found on the site, suggesting that the Minoans performed an orderly evacuation before the eruption, and they had time to take their valuables before they fled.