Ancient Thera: A Dorian City Above Santorini’s Caldera

Ancient Thera is the ruined Greek city that stands on Mesa Vouno, a steep limestone ridge almost 400 metres high on the south-east coast of Santorini, between the beaches of Kamari and Perissa. Founded by Dorian Greeks long after the Bronze Age eruption had emptied the island, it was the island’s main town for well over a thousand years: an Archaic city that sent colonists to North Africa, a naval base of the Ptolemaic kings of Egypt, a Roman provincial town and an early Christian bishopric. Its streets, agora, theatre and sanctuaries run along the crest of the ridge, with the sea dropping away on either side. On our Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus tour we end the third day here, after a morning in Oia and an afternoon at Akrotiri.

Mesa Vouno and the logic of a highland city

Most of Santorini is soft volcanic rock. Mesa Vouno is different: a block of limestone that rises steeply from the coast, with cliffs falling to the sea on three sides. The people who settled it chose it for exactly that reason. The ridge was naturally defensible, it commanded wide views over the sea around the island’s south-east cape, and it had a harbour at each foot, at Kamari to the north and Perissa to the south. The only easy approach is from the west, across the saddle known as Sellada, which was the city’s land entrance and the site of one of its cemeteries.

The city that grew up there is long and narrow, shaped by the ridge. A main street almost 800 metres long runs along the crest, lined with public buildings, houses and shops, and the town spreads out where the ground allows onto a central plateau and down terraces on the eastern slope. Almost everything is built of the local limestone, because timber was scarce on the island. Walking the street today is the best way to understand the place: the city reveals itself section by section, from the agora to the theatre and on to the sanctuaries at the far, seaward end.

Dorian foundation and the Archaic city

After the Late Bronze Age eruption buried the town at Akrotiri, Santorini appears to have been left largely deserted for centuries. When Greek settlers arrived, they were Dorians, speakers of the dialect of Sparta and much of the Peloponnese. The historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, told how a Spartan nobleman named Theras led a group of colonists to the island, which had previously been called Kallisti, “the most beautiful”, and gave it his own name. Like many foundation stories, it mixes memory with myth. The archaeological evidence is clearer about the timing than about the people: the excavators date the beginnings of the city on Mesa Vouno to the ninth or eighth century BC.

The Archaic period, roughly the seventh and sixth centuries BC, was the city’s heyday. Its most important deity was Apollo Karneios, a Dorian form of the god whose sanctuary stands at the south-eastern end of the ridge. The festivals held in his honour included the Gymnopaidiai, with dancing and athletic display by the city’s youths, and they took place on an open terrace near the temple overlooking the sea.

Thera’s one great venture overseas also belongs to this period. According to Herodotus, a long drought drove the Therans to send settlers to the coast of North Africa, where around 631 BC they founded Cyrene, in what is now Libya. Cyrene grew into one of the richest Greek cities in the Mediterranean, and Thera was remembered for centuries as its mother city.

Inscriptions on the rock

Ancient Thera holds some of the earliest examples of the Greek alphabet anywhere. Inscriptions cut into the bare rock near the sanctuaries, and early dedications on altars to Zeus, Apollo, Hermes and other gods, date back as early as the eighth century BC. Some record names and dedications; others, carved into the rock faces around the area later occupied by the gymnasium, record athletic contests and personal boasts in an early and sometimes obscure form of Greek. They are a reminder that the people of this ridge were among the first Greeks to put their own words into writing.

A Ptolemaic naval base

The city you see today is largely the product of a later age. After the death of Alexander the Great, the eastern Mediterranean was contested between the kingdoms of his successors, and from the early third century BC Thera came under the Ptolemies, the Macedonian dynasty that ruled Egypt. They valued it for its position on the routes through the southern Aegean and stationed a garrison and part of their fleet here, keeping the island until about 145 BC.

The Ptolemaic presence transformed the city. The commander’s headquarters stood at its highest point, and officers lived in houses with colonnaded courtyards on terraces on the eastern slope. Major public buildings went up or were rebuilt, including the long stoa on the agora and the theatre cut into the slope below the main street, and sanctuaries were dedicated to the Egyptian gods and to the Ptolemaic rulers themselves. One of the most striking monuments of this time is a small rock-cut sanctuary founded by Artemidoros of Perge, an admiral of the Ptolemaic fleet, cut into the rock and dedicated to the gods he honoured. A gymnasium for the city’s young men, the ephebes, was built on the south side of the town in the Hellenistic or Roman period.

Roman town, Byzantine bishopric

Under Roman rule, from the first century BC, Thera remained a modest but prosperous provincial town. The agora was enlarged, the stoa was rebuilt in the first century AD with a room for statues of the imperial family, and public baths were added. Decline set in from the third century AD, but the city remained the island’s main settlement, and in the early Christian period it was the seat of a bishop, with basilicas built over earlier buildings.

The end came slowly. In AD 726 a relatively small eruption of the Santorini volcano covered the city in pumice, and although some people sheltered among the ruins afterwards, the city was eventually abandoned. Large-scale excavation began in the 1890s under the German archaeologist Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen, and the cemeteries on the slopes below were excavated between 1961 and 1982. Many of the finds are in the archaeological museum in Fira. For the island’s wider history, before and after Ancient Thera, see our history of Santorini.

How is Ancient Thera different from Akrotiri?

They belong to different worlds, separated by roughly a thousand years and a volcanic catastrophe. Akrotiri was a Bronze Age harbour town on the low south coast, closely linked to Minoan Crete, abandoned before the eruption of the seventeenth or sixteenth century BC and preserved beneath its ash. Ancient Thera is a Greek city of the first millennium BC and later, founded by Dorian settlers on a defensible ridge, written about by Herodotus, and rebuilt by Hellenistic kings and Roman administrators. Akrotiri survives because it was buried; Ancient Thera survives because it was built of stone on a mountain and slowly abandoned. Seeing both on the same day, as the tour does, shows the island’s history in two very different chapters.

What to look for on a visit

The site rewards a few simple questions. As you climb from Sellada, notice how the city follows the ridge and how little flat ground there was to build on. In the agora, look for the change in level between the public buildings on the slope side and the houses below on the seaward side. At the theatre, turn round and consider the view its audience had over the sea. At the far end, in the sanctuaries of Apollo Karneios, look for the inscriptions in the rock and the terrace where the festivals were held. And from the highest point, look west across the island towards the caldera, and imagine the eruption that buried Akrotiri many centuries before this city was built.

How much walking does Ancient Thera involve?

More than at Akrotiri. Vehicles can climb the winding road from Kamari to the saddle at Sellada, but the last stretch up to the site is on foot, and visitors then follow the ancient road network along the ridge. Allow about an hour and a half on the site. The paths are rough and uneven in places, the ridge is exposed to sun and wind, and sturdy shoes, a hat and water are essential. 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 vary by season, and we confirm them before each departure.

Ancient Thera within the island journey

Ancient Thera completes the tour’s first full day on Santorini. The next morning we walk through Fira and take a boat out to Nea Kameni, the volcanic island at the centre of the caldera, to see the geology that shaped everything Akrotiri and Thera were built on. From there the journey continues to Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus, a sequence explained in our Eastern Mediterranean islands itinerary.

Standing on the ridge of Mesa Vouno, with the sea on both sides and the island spread out below, it is easy to see why people chose to build a city here, and why it lasted so long. To walk it with a guide, on the same day as Akrotiri, in a small group of 6 to 14 travellers, explore the Santorini, Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus small group tour.