Akrotiri, Santorini: A Bronze Age Port City Beneath Volcanic Ash

Akrotiri, on Santorini’s southern peninsula, is a Bronze Age port town that was buried under metres of volcanic ash and pumice some three and a half thousand years ago, and so preserved with its streets, houses, stairways and painted rooms still standing two and three storeys high. It was one of the most important harbour towns in the Aegean, trading with Minoan Crete, the Greek mainland and the eastern Mediterranean, and it is now one of the best places anywhere to see how people of that world actually lived. Today a modern roof shelters the excavated streets, and visitors walk among buildings that were abandoned in the days before the eruption. On our Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus tour we see the finds in the Prehistoric Museum of Thera in Fira on Day 2, then walk through Akrotiri itself on the afternoon of Day 3.

A harbour town on a narrow peninsula

The site lies on the south coast of Santorini, a couple of kilometres from the modern village that shares its name. People first settled here in the Late Neolithic, around 4500 BC, drawn by a narrow peninsula with safe anchorages on either side and farmland close at hand. Through the Early Cycladic period, from about 3200 to 2100 BC, the village grew into a significant stopping point on the sea routes of the Aegean, and in the Middle Cycladic period it developed rapidly into one of the most important urban centres and ports in the region.

Its position explains its success. Santorini sits on the southern edge of the Cyclades, roughly on the line between Crete and the islands to the north, and Akrotiri lay on the route between Minoan Crete and Cyprus. That made it a natural staging post for ships carrying copper and other goods, and moulds and crucibles found on the site suggest that metal was worked here as well as traded.

The island looked different then. Before the eruption Santorini was a single, larger island, and the great flooded caldera that visitors now look down into from Fira and Oia did not exist in its present form. The broader story of how the island was shaped, settled and resettled over the millennia is told in our history of Santorini; this article stays with the town at Akrotiri and what its excavation reveals.

The urban plan of Akrotiri

What has been excavated is only part of the town. The uncovered area covers some three acres, and in it archaeologists have found more than thirty multi-storey buildings, both public and private, set along paved streets that open into small squares. Houses rose to two and three storeys. Many had ground-floor rooms used for storage and work, and what were probably the finer living rooms upstairs, lit by windows and in some cases decorated with wall paintings.

The town was carefully engineered. A drainage system ran beneath the streets, and sanitary areas inside the houses were connected to it. Buildings were designed with protection against earthquakes in mind. The excavators gave modern names to the streets and squares as they uncovered them, such as Telchines Street and the Triangle Square, and to the buildings, such as the West House, the House of the Ladies and the large building known as Xeste 3.

The volcanic ash preserved things that almost never survive. Where wooden furniture had rotted away, it left hollows in the ash, and pouring plaster into these has produced casts of beds, tables, chairs and stools. Clay vessels were often found whole, some still holding their contents, and storage jars contained traces of foodstuffs. Few other Bronze Age sites in the Aegean give so complete a picture of ordinary rooms as they were last used.

The frescoes of Akrotiri

The wall paintings are Akrotiri’s greatest legacy. They were painted on lime plaster in a style closely related to Minoan painting on Crete, and they show a world of landscapes, animals, rituals and people in remarkable detail. Some were found still in place on the walls; others had fallen in fragments and have been painstakingly reassembled.

The Spring Fresco, found in 1970 in the room known as Delta 2, fills the walls of a small room with red lilies growing from rocky volcanic ground while swallows swoop between them. It is now displayed in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Other paintings include a scene of blue monkeys climbing among rocks, found in 1969, a young fisherman carrying his catch, and, from the West House, a long miniature frieze of ships moving between coastal towns. In Xeste 3, a large public building in the south-west of the excavated area, wall paintings of young women and girls gathering crocus flowers appear to relate to rites of passage. Part of the Xeste 3 painting is displayed in the Prehistoric Museum of Thera in Fira, along with paintings from the West House.

These images are evidence as much as art. The ships of the West House frieze, the imported pottery and the copper-working debris all point to a community that lived by the sea and by trade, while the ritual scenes suggest a religious life closely connected to that of Minoan Crete.

Trade, Crete and the wider Aegean

Fragments of foreign pottery show that Akrotiri traded with Crete, mainland Greece, the other Cyclades, the south-eastern Aegean and centres further east. Its wealth, the official site description notes, appears to have come above all from commerce and seafaring. Inscriptions in Linear A, the still undeciphered script used in Minoan administration, show how closely the town was tied to Crete, even though Akrotiri was a Cycladic settlement in its own right rather than a Minoan colony in any simple sense.

That connection is why the tour moves on from Santorini to Crete. Two days after Akrotiri we fly to Heraklion, and on Day 6 we visit the great palace whose art and administration Akrotiri reflects. Our guide to Knossos palace and its excavation picks up the story there, and our article on the Bronze Age civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean islands sets both places within the wider world they shared.

Why were no bodies found at Akrotiri?

Because the people of Akrotiri seem to have left before the eruption buried the town. Unlike Pompeii, the site has yielded no skeletons of people caught by the disaster, and almost no valuables: only one gold object has been found, hidden beneath a floor. The evidence points to warning signs. A strong earthquake struck the town at the height of its prosperity, and the inhabitants appear to have begun clearing debris and preparing to rebuild before the volcano erupted, perhaps some weeks later. Where they went, and whether they survived, is not known.

This was not the first earthquake the town had weathered. An earlier seismic disaster, towards the middle of the seventeenth century BC on the excavators’ chronology, had already damaged Akrotiri, and it was rebuilt quickly. The final earthquake and the eruption that followed ended its history. Santorini then remained deserted for centuries, and the next major settlement on the island, the city whose ruins are described in our article on Ancient Thera, was built on a mountain ridge in the south-east of the island a very long time afterwards.

When did the eruption happen?

No one yet knows the exact year, and the question is one of the longest-running debates in Aegean archaeology. Archaeologists working from pottery styles and links with Egyptian records have tended to place the eruption between about 1570 and 1500 BC. Radiocarbon dates from plant remains found beneath the ash pointed earlier, to around 1600 BC or before. A 2018 study at the University of Arizona, which measured radiocarbon in individual tree rings to refine the calibration of those dates, produced a range of about 1600 to 1525 BC, overlapping with the archaeological estimate. The excavators themselves describe the eruption as probably at the end of the seventeenth century BC.

The eruption was one of the largest of the last several thousand years, and it buried the island beneath thick deposits of pumice and ash that are still visible in the cliffs of Santorini. Its effects on Crete are also debated. Some scholars once saw it as the cause of the end of Minoan civilisation, but the palaces of Crete continued for generations afterwards, and most now see its effects as one pressure among several rather than a single knockout blow.

Was Akrotiri Atlantis?

There is no evidence that it was. Plato’s story of Atlantis, written more than a thousand years after the eruption, describes an island empire swallowed by the sea, and since the twentieth century some writers have suggested that memories of the destruction of Bronze Age Santorini lie behind it. It remains an intriguing idea, but it is a hypothesis about how a myth may have formed, not an identification supported by archaeology. Nothing found at Akrotiri connects the town to Plato’s account, and Akrotiri itself was buried rather than sunk beneath the waves.

The excavation and the modern shelter

Systematic excavation began in 1967 under Professor Spyridon Marinatos, who died in a fall at the site in 1974 and is buried there. Professor Christos Doumas took over the following year and has directed the work ever since, under the auspices of the Archaeological Society at Athens. Much of the town remains unexcavated.

The excavated area is protected by a large bioclimatic shelter. In 2005 a new roof collapsed shortly before it was completed, killing a visitor, and the site was closed for seven years. It reopened to the public on 11 April 2012 under the new steel and timber roof, and excavation, halted for lack of funds after 2005, resumed in 2016.

How much walking does Akrotiri involve, and how long should you allow?

Allow at least an hour, and more if you want to linger over the buildings. Visitors follow a set route through the town with chosen viewing points, under the roof, which gives welcome shade on a hot afternoon. The walking itself is not long, but expect some uneven ground and standing while the guide explains what you are looking at. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2, Moderate: three to five hours of activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to eight kilometres on uneven ground. Opening hours change with the season, so we confirm them before each departure.

Should you visit the Prehistoric Museum of Thera before Akrotiri?

Yes, and that is how the tour is arranged. The museum in Fira displays finds from Akrotiri and other prehistoric sites on Santorini, including part of the wall painting from Xeste 3 and paintings from the West House. Seeing them first, on the afternoon of Day 2, means that when you walk into the buildings at Akrotiri the next day you can picture the rooms with their paintings, furniture and pottery in place. The one painting you will not see on Santorini is the Spring Fresco, which is in Athens.

Akrotiri within the island journey

Akrotiri is the first great site of the tour, and it sets up much of what follows. The day after, a boat takes us into the flooded caldera that the eruption helped to create, described in our guide to Nea Kameni, the volcanic island at the heart of the caldera, and from there the journey moves on to Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus. How those places connect, from Bronze Age harbour towns to medieval fortresses, is the theme of our Eastern Mediterranean islands itinerary.

Few places bring the Bronze Age Aegean so close. At Akrotiri you walk the same streets as the town’s inhabitants, look into their storerooms and climb toward the rooms they painted, knowing that they left in haste and never returned. To see it with a guide, after the museum the day before, in a small group of 6 to 14 travellers, explore the Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus small group tour.