Bees in Paris: santorini

We leave Piraeus, Athens's port, at some ungodly hour and take an eight-hour ferry to Santorini. Santorini is a volcanic caldera: supervolcano explodes, leaves massive crater, which is filled in with ocean. One side of the island, the inside of the curve, is a steep drop to the water, and the other side is relatively flat (including beaches! though they are volcanic rock and not sand). We stay in the main town, Fira, of which approximately 90% of the buildings are hotels. The other 10% are restaurants.

Looking back at the mainland from the ferry:

Santorini from the ferry (we're inside the caldera):

Now on caldera's edge, in Fira:

Fira:

Caldera (the small island is the resurgent dome of the volcano, where it's forming a new island in the middle of the caldera):

"The island was the site of one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recorded history when it erupted cataclysmically some 3,500 years ago, at the height of the Mycenaean epoch. The eruption left a large caldera surrounded by volcanic ash deposits hundreds of feet deep and, according to a theory, its effects may have indirectly led to the collapse of the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete, 110 km (70 mi) to the south, due to a gigantic tsunami. Another popular theory holds that the Thera [Santorini] eruption is the source of the legend of Atlantis." (says wikipedia)

There was a Minoan settlement on Santorini at the time, called Akrotiri, which was preserved in the volcanic eruption and is now famous for its wall paintings. This is my favorite. Fun fact from my Greek archaeology class (comes in useful all the time): during the Akrotiri excavations, no bodies were found. It seems that the residents had some sort of warning and they all vacated the island before the volcano erupted.