Jökull - 01.06.2000, Page 82

Two books about Santorini
Sigurður Steinþórsson
Science Institute, University of Iceland, Jarðfræðahúsi v/ Hringbraut, IS-107 Reykjavík
FIRE IN THE SEA. The Santorini Volcano:
Natural History and the Legend of Atlantis, by
Walter L. Friedrich. Translated from German by
Alexander R. McBirney. Cambridge University
Press; 2000. 258 pp.
“I never read a book before reviewing it - it prejudices
a man so,“said the Rev. Sydney Smith (1771-1845),
and sometimes this may be a tempting attitude. But
not in the present case: Fire in the Sea represents a
fascinating account of geological and historical asp-
ects of this jewel of the Aegean, the island of Santor-
ini. Indeed, in ancient times this island used to be cal-
led ‘Calliste’, the most beautiful.
Santorini is one of several volcanic islands in the
Aegean Sea. Most of them are located along an arch
overlying the 170 km isobath of the Benioff zone
separating the African and Eurasian crustal plates.
The core of Santorini, however, is made of metamorp-
hosed sediment laid down up to 200 million years
ago. Volcanic activity can be traced 1.6 million ye-
ars back, including five major Plinian eruptions. The
last of these eruptions - the Minoan eruption 1650
BC - produced the thick layer of white pumice which
so characterizes Santorini and makes it quite unlike
any other place on Earth. In the 1860s, during the
construction of the Suez Canal, the pumice - ‘pozzol-
ana’ - was quarried in great quantities and shipped to
Port Said for making cement. To everyone’s surprise,
a ‘Bronze Age Pompeii’ was unearthed in one of the
quarries, remains of a lost civilization buried beneath
the thick pumice. And already in 1872 the idea was
put forward that Santorini was in fact Atlantis, Plato’s
mythical island which sank into the sea in cataclysmic
earthquakes and floods.
Sporadic archaeological excavations continued in
the 19th and 20th centuries and more ruins were
found beneath the pumice. The present phase of
archaeological research on Santorini began in 1969
when the Greek archaeologist Spyrodon Marinatos
started his work near the village Akrotiri in the
south part of the island. “From the beginning,”
Friedrich writes, “his extensive excavations at Akrot-
iri quickly led to almost daily sensational disco-
veries, including multi-stored houses embellished
with admirable frescoes and painted ceramics. Cle-
arly, a very significant site had been uncovered, per-
haps the most important in Greece of the century.” It
was Marinatos who first suggested in 1939 that the
demise of the Minoan civilization in Crete, unearthed
by Arthur Evans at Knossos in the early 20th Cent-
ury, was actually a consequence of the eruption of
Santorini. However, it is now clear that, although the
eruption played great havoc in and around the eastern
Mediterranean, it did not destroy the Minoan culture
in Crete which was to survive another half millenni-
um. That culture, as described by Evans, was cent-
ered on the palace of Knossos and was in many ways
a Bronze-Age replica of upper-class Victorian Eng-
land. Interestingly, the German geologist H. G. Wund-
erlich, working in Crete, started having misgivings
about Evans’ interpretation of the Knossos ruins. He
subsequently published a book, The Secret of Crete
(English version 1975), in which he argues quite con-
vincingly that Knossos was in fact not a palace but a
necropolis, a city of the dead.
In 1969 the first International Scientific Congress
on the Volcano Thera was held in Athens and Santor-
ini, assembling 140 scientists of various disciplines
from 15 countries. The Icelandic volcanologist S.
Thorarinsson attended the conference and published
the following year a comprehensive review article in
an Icelandic journal: Er Atlantisgátan að leysast? (Is
the Atlantis riddle being solved?, Andvari, 1970: 55-
84) in which he drew on research results from the
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