BOX 150: Crete and Santorini.

You're looking at a town built on the rim of a volcano--or what was once a volcano, with the sea now filling the crater, after a cataclysmic explosion 3600 years ago. This can only be Santorini, the island in the Aegean Sea, where my friend Max and I were continuing our travels through Italy and Greece in 1983.

We had left Athens for Crete to meet up with our friend Dede, an American lawyer working in London. She was flying to Crete for a week of relaxation in a little resort town just east of Heraklion, the capital on the north coast, and we were glad not only to see her but to settle in one place after being on the go by rental car, boat and bus for several weeks. Here is a photo I took at dawn as our ship approached Crete: I suppose it could be anywhere, but the image somehow looks Greek to me.

Otherwise I didn't take many photos during our stay in Crete (and as usual, now regret it), though I remember with pleasure the beach just down the street from our hotel and the good food (mostly grilled swordfish and salads--our 'Greek salads' everywhere had tomato, cucumber and feta, but on Crete shredded cabbage too). We did explore parts of the large island (Dede must have rented a car, though I don't quite recall it), beginning with the ruins of Knossos, just outside Heraklion. After we'd seen so many temples of "classical Greece" in Italy and Greece, it was surprising to see remnants (somewhat touched up) of the very different and much older Minoan civilization.

As for the Crete of 1983, once you got outside Heraklion and the resort areas, you found yourself in a very traditional world:

Besides the small churches and chapels I loved the Cretan countryside, as in these views of what I think are olive groves:

Of course, the coastal waters were pretty attractive too:

I think the above photo shows the bay near the town of Agios Nikolaos, which we visited one afternoon:

My only other photo of that day is of a mosaic floor from an early-Christian ruin at nearby Elounda. You can compare these dolphins with the ones on the mural at Knossos:

On another excursion, to a beach on the south coast, we stopped at the ruins of the Minoan palace of Phaistos, from which we could see the legendary Mt Ida:

At the end of the week Dede flew back to London, having invited Max and me to visit her and stay at her apartment. We planned to fly to London from Athens after visiting a few more Greek islands in the Cyclades between Crete and Attica. Our first step was to go to a travel agency to book boat passage to and one night's stay on Santorini, the first island north of Crete, across a considerable stretch of sea. The agent seemed incredulous that we wanted to stay only one night--but we understood his reaction only at the moment we caught sight of the island and immediately resolved to extend our stay.

I guess I had been expecting Santorini to look like any other island; whatever I had read about it didn't prepare me for that first sighting. Maybe riding across the open sea for several hours added to the first impression.

As the ship rounded the point you see in the above photo and into the harbor--i.e., into the flooded caldera of the former volcano, where a smoldering ashy island in the middle still showed signs of volcanic activity--we saw Santorini's main town, Thera (aka Thira and Fira), spread along its cliff:

Below are two more photos of Thera as we moved closer. ('Thera' is also the alternate Greek name for the island itself, once colonized by the Venetians, who named it after St Irene.) Although smaller ships let people ashore below Thera, for a donkey ride up a switchback path, our ferry docked at a place farther south (to the right of the photos), where a bus took us up a slope to Thera.

Santorini is roughly crescent-shaped, with a few uninhabited smaller islands dotting what was once the circle of a volcano rim. Unfortunately, none of my photos really convey the

sensation of being there, which to me was like visiting the Grand Canyon. I normally don't like including professional photos in my posts, but I'll add this image from Pinterest because it gives a little more sense of the epic view from Thera. It also shows the ashen island in the center of the crater--at the left in the photo--but not the smoke or steam that constantly rose from its crevices. In the opposite direction(s) from the rim the ground slopes more gently to the sea, with black-sand as well as white-sand beaches. We could get to most places on the island thanks to a network of buses, which were always packed with a mix of tourists and locals while the bus drivers played Greek songs through the loudspeakers. Speaking of transportation, here are the donkeys going up and down the steps to the sea below Thera:

And here is a donkey at rest, with a couple of dogs:

(There were plenty of cats too on the narrow streets of the town. At the one bad restaurant we experienced--it had been recommended by a New York Times article--we and other disappointed tourists at our big outdoor table ended up feeding most of our dinners to the cats at our feet.)

One afternoon we took a bus to the small town of Oia, on the north end of the curve. There was to be a concert late that afternoon (Bach Orchestral Suite #3, Beethoven Symphony #2), and when we got there the orchestra was still rehearsing, providing a great soundtrack for our views of the island from Oia's vantage point.

I'm not sure whether this next shot is of Oia or back in Thera; probably the latter:

There was a full moon during one of our nights on Santorini, but I wasn't able to get a good photo of the island seen by moonlight. The next day we visited excavations of the ancient (pre-eruption) town of Thera:

Small churches, often standing alone outside the towns, made striking contrasts with the landscape:

Often a church dome or bell tower was painted a sky blue, though the one in the photo below had touches of green too:

Back at a cafe in Thera I took this photo of Max with a glass of roditis:

I don't remember (if I ever knew) the name of this town, seen from a bus as we were going to or from one of the beaches:

In between two of those stretches of beach there was an outcrop of rock with ruins at the top. It was a very steep climb up a narrow path, but there was donkey service which we took. I didn't attempt to use my camera during the climb with its dizzying views of the rocks below, but I'm sorry I didn't take a photo of the donkey or its teenage wrangler when we got to the top. I did shoot this view of rocks and wildflowers at the top, which shows a second steeper and barer hill beyond ours:

There was this abandoned building at the top:

The ruins were completely untended, but we did find a panther-like animal and an eagle-like bird carved into rocks:

At this point I'm unhappy to report that I'm missing a box of slides that would have covered the rest of our trip, including more Santorini photos. It must have been mislaid a long time ago, because when I started writing numbers on my slide boxes (also many years ago), I went from the present box to "151," which contains photos from the next spring. I can still see some of these missing slides in my mind's eye, and I'm hoping that someday I'll come across them and be able to add them to One More Box of Slides. For now, for those who are curious to know about the rest of the trip, I'll give a brief summary--just pretend there are accompanying photos.

Our other island stay as we continued north through the Cyclades was Paros, chosen largely because of a New York Times travel article I'd read. Our boat landed in the main port city, Parikia, but we took a bus to Naousa, a smaller town to the north on a bay, with a good beach nearby and a waterfront where cafes served the local specialty of grilled octopus. One day we took a small ferryboat to the neighboring island of Naxos. We'd planned just to see the capital city, also called Naxos (aka Chora), but we were approached by a taxi driver who offered to give us a 2-1/2-hour tour of the interior of the island for a reasonable price. We took him up on his offer, and it was certainly one of our better decisions: it was a great tour of a beautiful land where I don't recall seeing a single other tourist. We were shown a Venetian villa from days of Venice's colonization; a little church with interesting interior artwork (our guide had to hunt up the priest for a key to the door); and, most remarkably, a kouros--one of those life-size Archaic Greek statues of a young man, this one lying partly buried in a clearing in a grove of gnarled trees. (I don't know why it wasn't in a museum, but I doubt that it was a realistic fake just for the pennies of a few tourists a day in a remote area.) It was on private land that had a tiny tavern attached to it that served a local lemon-flavored liqueur with a little plate of cheese in small chunks reminding me of parmesan. The two flavors went perfectly together as we sat with the driver in the shade of the trees. After our tour we explored the town of Naxos a bit and saw the ancient Gate of Apollo at the harbor.

Back in Athens we took one side trip, to Epidaurus (near Corinth), where Ancient Greek drama was being performed (in either ancient or modern Greek--it was Greek to us) in an especially well-preserved amphitheater. (Shortly before the show started there seemed to be a great fuss being made down in the front row; we were told that Melina Mercouri, then the Minister of Culture, had just arrived.)

We found a cheap flight from Athens to London on Bulgarian Airlines, the only drawback being some hours' layover in Sofia. We'd hoped that we would be allowed to leave the airport to get a taste of the Bulgarian capital, but the customs official didn't allow it. We had a fine time visiting Dede in London (I don't remember if I took photos), and I finally returned to the States after flying back to Brussels to connect to whatever airline (Sabina?) I was using for my round-trip ticket. This had been the longest of any trip I had taken abroad, about 7 weeks, and you can judge from the last eight posts how rewarding it was. My next post will return us to Sheboygan in 1984.