Santorini
Santorini, officially Thira or Thera, is a Greek island in the southern Aegean Sea, about southeast from the mainland. It is the largest island of a small, circular archipelago formed by the Santorini caldera. It is the southernmost member of the Cyclades group of islands, with an area of approximately and a 2021 census population of 15,480. The municipality of Santorini includes the inhabited islands of Santorini and Therasia, and the uninhabited islands of Nea Kameni, Palaia Kameni, Aspronisi, Anydros, and Christiana. The total land area is. Santorini is part of the Thira regional unit.
Santorini is the most active volcanic centre in the South Aegean Volcanic Arc. The volcanic arc is approximately long and wide. The region first became volcanically active around 3–4 million years ago, though volcanism on Thera began around 2 million years ago with the extrusion of dacitic lavas from vents around Akrotiri. One of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history struck the island about 3,600 years ago, leaving a large water-filled caldera surrounded by deep volcanic ash deposits.
Names
The name "Santorini" is a contraction of Saint Irene, after an old church in the village of Perissa.Of Venetian influence, the island bore the name Santorini since at least the middle of the twelfth century, the first mention being made by the geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi ;
During antiquity it was known as "Thēra" and before then, according to ancient writers, as "Kallístē", and — according to a modern tradition — as "Strongýlē" . The ancient name Thera, for Theras, the leader of the Spartans who colonized and gave his name to the island, was revived in the nineteenth century as the official name of the island and its main city, but the colloquial Santorini is still in popular use.
History
Minoan Akrotiri
The island was the site of one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history: the Minoan eruption, sometimes called the Thera eruption, which occurred about 3,600 years ago at the height of the Minoan civilization. The eruption left a large caldera surrounded by volcanic ash deposits hundreds of metres deep. It has been suggested that the colossal Santorini volcanic eruption is the source of the legend of the lost civilisation of Atlantis. The eruption lasted for weeks and caused massive tsunami waves.The region first became volcanically active around 3–4 million years ago, though volcanism on Thera began around 2 million years ago with the extrusion of dacitic lavas from vents around Akrotiri.
Excavations starting in 1967 at the Akrotiri site under Spyridon Marinatos have made Thera the best-known Minoan site outside Crete, homeland of the culture. Only the southern tip of a large town has been uncovered, yet it has revealed complexes of multi-level buildings, streets, and squares with remains of walls standing as high as eight metres, all entombed in the solidified ash of the famous eruption of Thera. The site was not a palace-complex as found in Crete nor was it a conglomeration of merchant warehousing. Its excellent masonry and fine wall-paintings reveal a complex community. A loom-workshop suggests organized textile weaving for export. This Bronze Age civilization thrived between 3000 and 2000 BC, reaching its peak in the period between 2000 and 1630 BC.
Many of the houses in Akrotiri are major structures, some of them three storeys high. Its streets, squares, and walls, sometimes as tall as eight metres, indicated that this was a major town; much is preserved in the layers of ejecta. The houses contain huge ceramic storage jars, mills, and pottery, and many stone staircases are still intact. Noted archaeological remains found in Akrotiri are wall paintings or frescoes that have kept their original colour well, as they were preserved under many metres of volcanic ash. Judging from the fine artwork, its people were sophisticated and relatively wealthy. Among more complete frescoes found in one house are two antelopes painted with a confident calligraphic line, a man holding fish strung by their gills, a flotilla of pleasure boats that are accompanied by leaping dolphins, and a scene of women sitting in the shade of light canopies. Fragmentary wall-paintings found at one site are Minoan frescoes that depict "saffron-gatherers" offering crocus-stamens to a seated woman, perhaps a goddess important to the Akrotiri culture. The themes of the Akrotiri frescoes show no relationship to the typical content of the Classical Greek décor of 510 BC to 323 BC that depicts the Greek pantheon deities.
The town also had a highly developed drainage system. Pipes with running water and water closets found at Akrotiri are the oldest such utilities discovered. The pipes run in twin systems, indicating that Therans used both hot and cold water supplies. The origin of the hot water they circulated in the town probably was geothermal, given the volcano's proximity.
The well preserved ruins of the ancient town are often compared to the spectacular ruins at Pompeii in Italy. The canopy covering the ruins collapsed in September 2005, killing one tourist and injuring seven; the site was closed until April 2012 while a new canopy was built.
The oldest signs of human settlement are Late Neolithic, but c. 2000–1650 BC Akrotiri developed into one of the Aegean's major Bronze Age ports, with recovered objects that came not just from Crete, but also from Anatolia, Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt, as well as from the Dodecanese and the Greek mainland.
Dating of the Bronze Age eruption
The Minoan eruption provides a fixed point for the chronology of the second millennium BC in the Aegean, because evidence of the eruption occurs throughout the region and the site itself contains material culture from outside. The eruption occurred during the "Late Minoan IA" period of Minoan chronology at Crete and the "Late Cycladic I" period in the surrounding islands.Archaeological evidence, based on an established chronology of Bronze Age Mediterranean cultures, dated the eruption to around 1500 BC. These dates, however, conflict with radiocarbon dating which indicated that the eruption occurred between 1645–1600 BC, and tree ring data which yielded a date of 1628 BC. For those, and other reasons, the previous culturally based chronology has generally been questioned.
In The Parting of the Sea: How Volcanoes, Earthquakes, and Plagues Shaped the Exodus Story, geologist Barbara J. Sivertsen theorizes a causal link between this eruption and the plagues of the Exodus.
Ancient period
Santorini remained unoccupied throughout the rest of the Bronze Age, during which time the Greeks took over Crete. At Knossos, in a LMIIIA context, seven Linear B texts while calling upon "all the deities" make sure to grant primacy to an elsewhere-unattested entity called qe-ra-si-ja and, once, qe-ra-si-jo. If the endings and -ios represent an ethnic suffix, then this means "The One From ". If the initial consonant were aspirated, then *Qhera- would have become "Thera-" in later Greek. "Therasia" and its ethnikon "Therasios" are both attested in later Greek; and, since -sos was itself a genitive suffix in the Aegean Sprachbund, *Qeras could also shrink to *Qera. If qe-ra-si-ja was an ethnikon first, then in following the entity the Cretans also feared whence it came.Probably after what is called the Bronze Age collapse, Phoenicians founded a site on Thera. Herodotus reports that they called the island Callista and lived on it for eight generations. In the ninth century BC, Dorians founded the main Hellenic city on Mesa Vouno, above sea level. This group later claimed that they had named the city and the island after their leader, Theras. Today, that city is referred to as Ancient Thera.
In his Argonautica, written in Hellenistic Egypt in the third century BC, Apollonius Rhodius includes an origin and sovereignty myth of Thera being given by Triton in Libya to the Greek Argonaut Euphemus, son of Poseidon, in the form of a clod of dirt. After carrying the dirt next to his heart for several days, Euphemus dreamt that he nursed the dirt with milk from his breast, and that the dirt turned into a beautiful woman with whom he had sex. The woman then told him that she was a daughter of Triton named Calliste, and that when he threw the dirt into the sea it would grow into an island for his descendants to live on. The poem goes on to claim that the island was named Thera after Euphemus' descendant Theras, son of Autesion, the leader of a group of refugee settlers from Lemnos.
The Dorians have left a number of inscriptions incised in stone, in the vicinity of the temple of Apollo, attesting to pederastic relations between the authors and their lovers. These inscriptions, found by Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen, have been thought by some archaeologists to be of a ritual, celebratory nature, because of their large size, careful construction and – in some cases – execution by craftsmen other than the authors. According to Herodotus, following a drought of seven years, Thera sent out colonists who founded a number of cities in northern Africa, including Cyrene. In the fifth century BC, Dorian Thera did not join the Delian League with Athens; and during the Peloponnesian War, Thera sided with Dorian Sparta, against Athens. The Athenians took the island during the war, but lost it again after the Battle of Aegospotami. During the Hellenistic period, the island was a major naval base for Ptolemaic Egypt.
Medieval and Ottoman period
As with other Greek territories, Thera then was ruled by the Romans. When the Roman Empire was divided, the island passed to the eastern side of the Empire which today is known as the Byzantine Empire. According to George Cedrenus, the volcano erupted again in the summer of 727, the tenth year of the reign of Leo III the Isaurian. He writes: "In the same year, in the summer, a vapour like an oven's fire boiled up for days out of the middle of the islands of Thera and Therasia from the depths of the sea, and the whole place burned like fire, little by little thickening and turning to stone, and the air seemed to be a fiery torch." This terrifying explosion was interpreted as a divine omen against the worship of religious icons and gave the emperor Leo III the Isaurian the justification he needed to begin implementing his Iconoclasm policy.The name "Santorini" first appears in the work of the Muslim geographer al-Idrisi, as "Santurin", from the island's patron saint, Saint Irene of Thessalonica. After the Fourth Crusade, it was occupied by the Duchy of Naxos which held it up to circa 1280 when it was reconquered by Licario ; it was again reconquered from the Byzantines circa 1301 by Iacopo II Barozzi, a member of the Cretan branch of the Venetian Barozzi family, whose descendant held it until it was annexed to Venice in by Niccolo Sanudo after various legal and military conflicts. In 1318–1331 and 1345–1360 it was raided by the Turkish principalities of Menteshe and Aydın, but did not suffer much damage. Because of the Venetians the island became home to a sizable Catholic community and is still the seat of a Catholic bishopric.
From the 15th century on, the suzerainty of the Republic of Venice over the island was recognized in a series of treaties by the Ottoman Empire, but this did not stop Ottoman raids, until it was captured by the Ottoman admiral Piyale Pasha in 1576, as part of a process of annexation of most remaining Latin possessions in the Aegean. It became part of the semi-autonomous domain of the sultan's Jewish favourite, Joseph Nasi. Santorini retained its privileged position in the 17th century, but suffered in turn from Venetian raids during the frequent Ottoman–Venetian wars of the period, even though there were no Muslims on the island.
Santorini was captured briefly by the Russians under Alexey Orlov during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774, but returned to Ottoman control after.