A port in the middle of the Aegean
People were living at Akrotiri by the fourth millennium BCE. In the Early Bronze Age a sizeable settlement grew up, and between the twentieth and seventeenth centuries BCE it became one of the main towns and ports of the Aegean, covering about 20 hectares, the size of some 28 football pitches.
Its people traded widely. Imported objects found in the houses show links with Minoan Crete, with the Greek mainland, the Dodecanese, Cyprus, Syria and Egypt. Crete, a little over a hundred kilometres to the south, was the closest great power, and the art of Akrotiri shares much with Knossos, from wall painting to the shape of its sacred rooms.
Earthquakes first, then the volcano
The town’s life ended suddenly in the last quarter of the seventeenth century BCE. Severe earthquakes forced the inhabitants to leave, and then the volcano erupted. Its ash and pumice covered the whole island, the town included, and the centre of the volcano collapsed, leaving the great flooded crater, the caldera, that defines Santorini today.
What destroyed the town also saved it. As at Pompeii, the volcanic material sealed the buildings and their contents. Storage jars and other objects stood where they had been left, but no victims have been found in the excavated houses, which fits the idea that the people had time to get away. When exactly the eruption happened is still debated: radiocarbon dates point to the late seventeenth century BCE, while other evidence has been read as pointing to around 1500 BCE.
A town of multi-storey houses
Akrotiri was a real town, with a drainage system under its streets and buildings of two or three storeys. The West House, small but well organised, shows how a household worked: storerooms, workshops, a kitchen and a mill on the ground floor, and upstairs a large room for weaving, a storeroom for pottery, a lavatory and two rooms decorated with paintings.
Other buildings were grander. The House of the Ladies was built around a central light-well. Xeste 3 had at least two storeys of fourteen rooms each and a sunken “lustral basin”, so it was probably used for rituals. The largest building excavated so far, Xeste 4, rose to three storeys, with façades faced in squared blocks of volcanic tuff, and painted figures of life-size men climbing its entrance stairs in procession: probably a public building.
Paintings that stayed on the walls
Akrotiri’s great treasure is its wall paintings, many found still on the walls of the upper floors. In Complex Delta, one room was decorated with the Spring Fresco: a rocky landscape of flowering lilies with swallows in flight. In Sector B, a first-floor room held the paintings of the Antelopes and of the Boxing Children, and another the Monkeys, climbing rocks beside a river.
In Xeste 3, women gather saffron crocuses and offer them to a seated goddess, guarded by a blue monkey and a griffin. And in the West House a long miniature frieze ran around all four walls of a room, showing a fleet at sea visiting harbours and towns. Its final destination, a port with rocky shores and tall houses, has been identified as Akrotiri itself.
How Akrotiri was found
The town lay under the volcanic debris south of the modern village of Akrotiri until the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos began excavating in 1967. He published reports on the excavation every year from 1968 and died on Thera in 1974, while the work was still going on. Digging has continued since, and tablets in Linear A, the Minoan script, have recently been found in Complex Delta.
Where to see it
The excavated town is on the south of Santorini, near the village of Akrotiri. Finds from the site are in the Museum of Prehistoric Thera on the island, and some of the most famous paintings, including the Spring Fresco and the Boxing Children, are in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
Sources
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Odysseus portal, “Akrotiri of Thera” (history and description).
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Thera” and “Spyridon Marinatos”.
- National Archaeological Museum, Athens, on the wall paintings from Akrotiri (Spring Fresco, Boxing Children).
