Greece and the Ægean Islands

by Philip Sanford Marden

No island that we visited in our Ægean cruise was more interesting than Thera proved to be, when we had steamed across the intervening ocean from Rhodes and into the immense basin that serves Thera—or modern Santorin—for a harbor. No more remarkable harbor could well be conceived.

If Vesuvius could be imagined to sink into Naples bay until there were left protruding only about a thousand feet of the present altitude; if the ocean should be admitted to the interior of the volcano by two great channels or fissures in the sides—one at the point where the ubiquitous Mr. Cook has—or did have—his funicular railway, and the other in the general locality represented by the ill-starred Bosco Trecase; and if the present awesome crater, into which so many thousand visitors have peered, should thus be filled throughout its extent by the cooling waters, so as to form a great and placid bay within the mountain,—then we should have an almost exact reproduction of what happened at Thera something like four thousand years ago. Furthermore, if we may add to our Vesuvian hypothesis the supposition that there be built along the eastern lip of the crater a long white town, stretching for perhaps a mile along the sharp spine of the summit, we should have an equally exact reproduction of what exists at Thera to-day.

Thera lies at the end of the chain of submerged peaks that reveal the continuation of the Attic peninsula under the waters of the Ægean. The same rocky range of mountains that disappears into the sea at Sunium rises again and again as it stretches off to the southeast to form the islands of Cythnos, Seriphos, Siphnos, and their fellows, and the series closes, apparently, in the volcanic island of Santorin, under which name the moderns know the island which the ancients called successively Kallista (most beautiful) and Thera. Considering her beauty as an island and her comparative nearness to the mainland of Greece or to Crete, Thera is surprisingly little known. Historically Thera had small celebrity compared with her neighbors; but in every other way it seemed to us that she surpassed them all. Legend appears to have left the island comparatively unhonored, and poetry has permitted her to remain unsung. No Byron has filled high his bowl with Theran wine. No burning poetess lived or sang in her single tortuous street. No god of Olympus claimed the isle for his birthright. But for beauty of every kind, from the pastoral to the sublimely awful, Thera has no fellow in the Ægean; and for extraordinary natural history and characteristics, it is doubtful if it has a fellow in the world. For it is a sunken volcano, with a bottomless harbor, where once was the centre of fiery activity,—a harbor, rimmed about with miles of encircling precipices, on the top of one of which lies the town of Thera, a thousand feet straight up above the sea, and reachable only by a steep and winding mule track which connects it with the diminutive landing stage below.

Santorin

There appears to be a wide divergence of opinion as to the exact date when the original mountain was blown to pieces and sunk in the ocean, but it may be roughly stated to have occurred in the vicinity of the sixteenth century before Christ, although some authorities incline to believe the eruption to have come to pass at a still earlier period. As to the inhabitants before the time of that extraordinary upheaval, little is known save what may be gleaned from a multitude of pottery vases left behind by those early settlers, and bearing ornamentation of a rude sort that stamps them as belonging to the remote pre-Mycenæan age, the age that preceded the greatness of Agamemnon’s city and the sack of Troy. It seems entirely probable that the early Therans were from Phœnicia, and tradition says that they came over under the leadership of no less a personage than Cadmus himself. What we know for a certainty, however, is that at some prehistoric time the original volcano underwent a most remarkable change and subsided, with a blaze of glory that can hardly be imagined, into the waters of the Ægean, until only the upper rim and three central cones are now to be seen above the water’s edge. Through two enormous crevices torn in the northern and southern slopes the irresistible ocean poured into the vast central cavity, cooling to a large extent the fiery ardor of the mountain and leaving it as we found it, a circle of frowning cliffs, nearly a thousand feet in height and something like eighteen miles in periphery, inclosing a placid and practically bottomless harbor in what was once the volcano’s heart, the surface of the bay pierced by only three diminutive islands, once the cones of the volcano, and not entirely inert even to-day. In fact one of these central islands appeared as recently as 1866 during an eruption that showed the fires of Santorin not yet to be extinguished by any means—a fact that is further testified to by the heat of certain portions of the inclosed waters of the basin.

LANDING-PLACE AT THERA

Into this curious harbor our little chartered ship glided in the early light of an April morning, which dimly revealed the walls of forbidding stone towering high above in cliffs of that black, scarred appearance peculiar to volcanic formation, marred by the ravages of the ancient fires, yet none the less relieved from utter sullenness here and there by strata of rich red stone or by patches of grayish white tufa. Nevertheless it was all sombre and forbidding, especially in the early twilight; for the sun had not yet risen above the horizon, much less penetrated into the cavernous depths of Thera’s harbor. High above, however, perched on what looked like a most precarious position along the summit of the cliff, ran the white line of the city, already catching the morning light on its domes and towers, but seeming rather a Lilliputian village than a habitation of men; while far away to the north, on another portion of the crater wall, a smaller city seemed rather a lining of frost or snow gathered on the crater’s lip.