Akrotiri: The City that May have inspired Atlantis

I recently visited Santorini, our first stop after leaving Athens. Our cruise ship joined several others in the enormous caldera. The blue domes and white buildings set along the cliffs of the ancient volcano were breathtaking. Once up on the cliffs looking down at the multiple cruise ships, I couldn’t imagine the violence of the eruption needed to create such a huge crater. After one stop, our guide pointed to a spot near the water at the southwestern end of Santorini — Akrotiri. He explained that the ruins of Akrotiri were discovered in the 1860s, but that systematic excavations didn’t start until 1967. He finished with the intriguing theory that the destruction of Akrotiri could have been the basis for the legend of Atlantis.

Santorini's volcanic caldera - Photo by John Topping

The City Under the Ash

Sometime around 1600 BC, the Aegean island of Thera, now called Santorini, erupted with a violence that ranked among the largest in recorded human history. Pinning down the exact date has proven surprisingly difficult. A 2018 article in Discover Magazine reported on researchers who used tree rings from bristlecone pines and Irish oaks grown 7,000 miles apart to demonstrate inconsistencies in carbon-14 levels. As a result, they estimated the eruption date as being between 1660 and 1525 BC. Even the most catastrophic events in human prehistory, like the eruption of Thera, are challenging to precisely date.

The Thera eruption was enormous, at VEI 6-7 on a scale that runs from 1 to 8. To put it into perspective, Mount St. Helens, a VEI 5, was much smaller, and Krakatoa, a VEI 6, was a bit smaller. The eruption blasted enormous quantities of ash, gas, and rock twenty-five miles into the atmosphere. The center of the island collapsed into the emptied magma chamber, forming the horseshoe-shaped caldera that today makes Santorini one of the most dramatically beautiful places on Earth. The deep blue waters, 1,300 feet deep in places, hide the enormity of the catastrophe.

Buried beneath the pumice and ash on the island's southern coast was Akrotiri, a prosperous, sophisticated Minoan city of several thousand people. Much like Pompeii, the pumice and ash both preserved and hid the ruins. When archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos began excavating the site in 1967, what emerged was staggering: two- and three-story buildings still standing, their walls decorated with vivid frescoes of fishermen, spring flowers, ships at sea, and blue monkeys. Given the violence of the eruption, it’s remarkable that so much remains intact. Among the most remarkable discoveries is the Fleet Fresco in the West House, a panoramic painting of a seafaring procession that gives us a detailed picture of Minoan maritime life. Pottery, impressions of wooden furniture, and storage vessels remained exactly where they had been placed more than three thousand years ago. A drainage system ran beneath the streets. A water supply system served the buildings.

Interestingly, unlike Pompeii, no human remains have been found at Akrotiri. Something, perhaps tremors, minor eruptions or smoke must have given the population enough warning to flee before the final cataclysm. They left their city intact with many of their possessions in place. Then Thera erupted, burying everything.

The Tsunami

The eruption itself was only part of the disaster. When the volcano's magma chamber emptied and the center of the island collapsed, it generated a megatsunami, a series of waves of extraordinary size that radiated across the Aegean. Evidence of the tsunami has been found in deep-sea sediment cores and coastal deposits across the eastern Mediterranean. The Minoan settlements on Crete's northern coast, the side facing Thera, were directly in its path.

Did Thera’s tsunami destroy the Minoan civilization? Probably not, but it could have contributed to its decline. The eruption undoubtedly devastated the Minoan civilization. The tsunami struck coastal settlements that were the heart of Minoan maritime trade, including Crete, the location of the Minoan capital, Knossos. Dense ash fallout may have blanketed much of Crete's agricultural land, acidifying soil and collapsing harvests. The economic disruption to a civilization built on seafaring commerce would have been severe and lasting.

But the Minoan civilization did not collapse due to the Thera eruption. It held on for another century or so, diminished and weakened but still functioning. What finished it was a different force entirely: the Mycenaeans. By around 1450 BC, the Mycenaeans, the mainland Greek civilization described in Homer’s epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad, had moved into Crete and absorbed what remained of Minoan power. The eruption of Thera may have cracked the foundation. The Mycenaeans completed the collapse.

A Note on The Poseidon Adventure

Since I was traveling on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and since the Thera eruption created a tsunami, I must tie in an old movie. The Poseidon Adventure (1972) — the original disaster film starring Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters — follows the ocean liner SS Poseidon on her final voyage from New York to Athens. The catastrophe that capsizes her is a massive wave generated by an undersea earthquake near Crete, approaching the ship at 60 miles per hour. It is, in other words, a tsunami originating in the same waters where the real Thera eruption sent its own waves crashing into the Minoan coastline more than three thousand years earlier. I wonder if the film's screenwriters knew about Thera and Akrotiri when they wrote the scene.

Did Thera Inspire Atlantis?

Many scholars have debated the connection between Thera and Plato's Atlantis since the 1960s. The circumstantial case is compelling. A wealthy, sophisticated island civilization, centered on a volcanic island in the Mediterranean, destroyed in a catastrophic eruption that also devastated the nearest great civilization on Crete generally fits Plato's story of a proud empire that vanished in a single day of earthquakes and floods.

Having said that, the hypothesis has significant problems. Plato places Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, not in the Aegean. He said Atlantis fell nine thousand years before Solon's time, which would put the date around 9600 BC, more than six thousand years before Thera erupted. And he describes it as larger than Libya and Asia Minor combined, a massive island, much larger than Thera.

Scholars who support the Thera hypothesis suggest that 900 years could have become 9,000 over centuries of retellings or a mistranslation of Egyptian records, and that the scale could have been inflated as well. Oral traditions and records copied by hand across cultures and centuries do accumulate errors like a long-term game of telephone. But the Thera hypothesis requires Plato's account to be significantly wrong on multiple specific details that he presents with confidence. Defenders of the Atlantis-as-allegory position, who argue that Plato invented it out of whole cloth, would say that's exactly what you'd expect from a philosophical fable.

No conclusive evidence has established that Thera inspired or influenced Plato’s Atlantis. But the lack of conclusive evidence leaves open the possibility that it did. Akrotiri sits buried in its pumice and ash awaiting further excavation and discoveries. Plato's Atlantis sits in his dialogues, beautiful and impactful, whether historical or allegorical.

 In the Atlantis Universe — and Why I'm Going Back

Thera is an example of how even catastrophic events were imperfectly recorded or dated. The distorted mirror of oral tradition can turn historical events into the seeds from which myth and legend sprout. While much of The Oracle of Atlantis takes place in Mycenaean Greece, the Thera eruption predates that. I look forward to returning to Santorini, visiting Akrotiri, admiring its roughly 3,600-year-old frescoes, and feeling the weight of history at the site that potentially inspired the legend of Atlantis. 

A brief additional note: tsunamis and megatsunamis have always fascinated me. I have written them into my Atlantis novels as well as into two of my technothrillers, Runaway and The Phoenix Conspiracy. Tsunamis and megatsunamis are the subject of a future newsletter.

Town of Oia, Santorini - Photo by John Topping

Further Listening & Reading

The Maritime History Podcast, Episode 013: "Akrotiri, Atlantis, and the Thera Eruption" — a deep dive into the Fleet Fresco found in the West House at Akrotiri, the eruption that buried the city, and the scholarly arguments for the Minoan civilization as Plato's inspiration. Available at maritimehistorypodcast.com and on YouTube.

Discover Magazine, August 15, 2018: "New Date for Greek Eruption That May Have Inspired the Atlantis Myth" — explains how researchers are using single tree rings from ancient bristlecone pines and Irish oaks to refine the eruption's date, and why pinning it down matters for the Atlantis debate.

Sources: Minoan eruption dating, Wikipedia and Discover Magazine (August 2018); Spyridon Marinatos, Akrotiri excavation reports, 1967 onward; PBS Secrets of the Dead, 'Sinking Atlantis — The Fall of the Minoans'; Visit Santorini, 'Akrotiri's Echoes of Atlantis'; The Maritime History Podcast, Episode 013 (maritimehistorypodcast.com).

Addition, not included in the Newsletter

Major Eruptions from Toba to Modern Times

The Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) measures the volume of material ejected in an eruption on a scale from 0 to 8. Each step upward represents a tenfold increase in erupted volume, so a VEI 7 eruption like Thera expelled roughly one hundred times the material of the VEI 5 eruption of Mount St. Helens — the event many Americans remember from 1980.

Eruption	Location	Approximate Date	VEI
Toba	Sumatra, Indonesia	74,000 years ago	8
Campanian Ignimbrite(Campi Flegrei)	Near Naples, Italy	40,000 years ago	7
Oruanui (Taupō)	New Zealand	25,700 years ago	8
Kikai–Akahoya	Southern Japan	~7,300 years ago	7
Thera — Santorini	Greece	~1600 BCE (date debated)	7
Tambora	Indonesia	1815	7
Krakatau (Krakatoa)	Indonesia	1883	6
Mount St. Helens	Washington, USA	1980	5
Pinatubo	Philippines	1991	6

Sources: U.S. Geological Survey; Smithsonian Institution Global Volcanism Program; published eruption research. Prehistoric dates and sizes are current estimates.