The ruins of Akrotiri are on the gentle slope of a hill one kilometer from the sea. To the south I see a small harbor. I enter through the door of a large flat building with a corrugated metal roof.

The ceiling is low with gaps that let sunshine cast a pale light over the ruins. Before me are re-erected 3600 year old buildings made of stone with cross members of wood which support and frame windows and doorways. 

In front of them  stand tall clay storage jars with large swirling designs, some as high as my shoulder. There is an intimacy to the ruins. They’re so accessible.

Everything is blanketed with volcanic pumice. It’s fine, like brown talcum powder. To the right, scaffolding and shovels litter an excavation in progress, fragments of walls and urns protrude above the surface of volcanic ash.  

I walk an ancient street called Telchines’ Road, up a makeshift ramp with a wood rail. I remember the wall paintings from Akrotiri which I saw in the National Archeological Museum in Athens, the paintings of boxing children, the playful movement of antelopes and the lady with the large lolling breasts.

I walk the board bridge over the ruins toward Mill Square, so named because of a granary close by. 

The two and three story structures with stone walls were originally plastered both inside and out. 

The plaster was of fine limestone colored pink, yellow and white. The wall paintings in the upper stories, where light splashed in from large windows, were painted on fine white plaster. The lower levels, where the temperature was coolest, were used for food storage. 

The floors were paved with stone slabs, broken seashells and pebbles. Stone and wood staircases led to  upper stories. Nothing of any value has been found in Akrotiri, and no bodies were among the rubble.

Akrotiri evidentally had been evacuated before the volcano erupted. Earthquakes had already already rocked the city many times before they destroyed it. I keep wondering if this was a great city on the island of Atlantis?

I make a pass through the ruins taking pictures. The security man at the exit talks to Japanese tourists. I watch, bathed in sunlight shining through the open exit as he kids one young Japanese woman.

As she exits, he says good-bye to her, then grabs her and kisses her on the cheek. She blushes deep crimson. He spots me through the crowd of people gathered about him, asks where I’m from. “Ameriki,” (America) I say.

He asks if I speak Greek. I answer, “Milao lio Ellinika” (I speak a little Greek). The Japanese laugh. He wonders if I’m a scientist. He noticed me taking a lot of pictures.

After talking to him a few minutes, I leave the crowd and reverse my steps through the ancient city, the three storied buildings and the huge clay bowls and pots. The city even had a sewer system.  

The tourists are all gone now, and I have the ancient city to myself, except for an occasional security guard. I go through one more time, starting  at the entrance.

I feel sad, sorry for the people of ancient Akrotiri, disrupted from living what seems to be, if one can draw an accurate picture of their lives from their wall paintings, a peaceful life surrounded by the pastoral beauty of the island. It is indeed an irony that the richness of the soil on Thera comes from the volcano which ultimately destroyed the island and will in all probability destroy it again.  

---

Back at my motor bike, I sit on the ground eating one of the small pizzas I picked up at the bakery earlier. Then I spend the rest of the day on the motorbike making noise. The wind blows me all over the road. I see several caves like the one next to my pension in which the pale horse lives. Some of the front surfaces of these caves are smoothed and rocked along the entrance. Others are cemented and whitewashed. These Hobbit-like dwellings shine brilliant white in the morning sun.

Finally, rattled from the wind and noise of my motorbike, I park at the side of the street in Fira and have two gyros and an order of fries at a small touristy fast-food place in the middle of town just across the street from where I rented my motorbike. I eat standing at a little bar sandwiched between the wall and the serving line, the only place to eat out of the wind. The place is crowded with Americans. A young lady in dreadlocks smiles at me a few times, and I ask where she's from. "Boulder, Colorado," she says. "I start college there in the fall." This is truly amazing. We're neighbors," I say. "You're my next door neighbor."

---

I spend the evening in my room staring out at the full moon rising over the Aegean, listening to evening sounds punctuated by whinnies from the pale horse.

The night in Munich, after I embarrassed myself so badly in front of the German girl, I went to the bathroom and when I returned, my friend Harry was actively pursuing the girl he had set me up with. Harry was married and I was divorced. He had a cavalier attitude toward marriage, something I valued even after my wife of eighteen years left me, maybe especially valued after she left. I had never experienced such a strong feeling of hatred until that evening when I saw Harry making up to that German girl.

I decided to have it out with him and walked outside looking for a club, a knife. I wondered what I could buy there in Munich. Through the few years since this episode, I've lost the handle on the rage I felt that night. It has metamorphosed into a benign, even humorous view of the events making it impossible to convey the depth of my hatred and the precarious knife edge on which I tread.

I assessed the situation for a while walking the streets of Munich alone, but when I went back inside the bar, my companions were arguing with the two women and a couple of German men, something about them just not liking Americans. “Superficial” is the word I kept hearing. I sat down again and tried to resume my conversation with the blond, but we rapidly started arguing also. She had a bad impression of Americans, and me dumping my beer in her purse had convinced her it was worth talking about.

As I came to my senses, I knew I had better leave, so I walked most of the way back to the hotel before I remembered my son. I couldn’t leave him. He was twenty-three years old but still, I couldn’t walk off like an idiot without tell him where I was going. I went back to the bar, ignoring my two business associates who were standing outside and who asked me what I was up to. I was still boiling and ignored them as I walked past. They shook their heads in disbelief.

I sat at the bar again with my son and the two women. They were getting more agreeable. I paid their bar bill and they left. But my anger didn’t leave. I was still in an absolute rage. My son and I walked back to the hotel, and when I entered our room, seeing my open suitcase lying on the foot of my bed, I threw it to the floor dumping its contents and fell into bed, embarrassed at what a sorry father I was being, full of self-hatred.

The next morning, I didn’t want to face my traveling companions, but I had no choice. I wanted to check out of my life instead of the hotel. How would I explain my bizarre behavior? My biggest embarrassment was that I had done this in front of my son. The episode did helped me realize how close to the edge I always tread. I felt as though I should see an exorcist. But this still wasn't the end of it.

Two years following the Munich incident, I had another episode similar to that many years before in Berkeley, a second encounter with the Furies. I was in the Alps hiking hut-to-hut with two business associates. We were one day out of Brand, Austria, sleeping in a pitch-dark hut high on a mountaintop. I woke during the night terror stricken.

The full moon has risen high enough that it no longer casts bright rays through my French doors. And now the slow, almost silent music of the wind plays this building like a mystical instrument. My curiosity gets the best of me this time, and I slip outside and up spiraling metal stairs to the roof. The west wind is strong as gravity. I stand on the flat white-stucco roof, where backpacking tourists sleep in the summer, and listen for the source of the sound. I look at the moonlit landscape to the east dotted with the yellow points of light from homes. In the distance, the white light from a ship at sea. To the west is the cave and standing in it’s dark entrance is the pale horse. He shakes his head at me and whinnies. I cup my ear into the wind. Is that mysterious music I hear?

1 Nov, Monday

I rise late, have a breakfast of fruit and donuts, and work off a little of it trying to start my motorbike. Finally all my kicking pays off, and I follow the wind and road signs to the ancient city of Thera. 

The road first leads through the small town of Kamari then along the black-sand beach, curving inland and up the switchbacks of a cobble stone road. My old motorbike vibrates until I believe I’m going to lose body parts.

It barely has the power to make the grade at the hairpin turns as I ascend the mountain with the sea falling away behind me to the east. The wind is strong, whipping at my clothes and several times almost blows me off the road.

Finally I stop in a large circular unpaved parking area just below the top of the mountain. Up some stone steps, I see the edge of ruins protruding from an outcropping of rocks.

I park my motorbike nose-to-the-wind to keep it from blowing over. I see only a couple of other bikes parked here and no cars. 

I start up the steep trail and think I have found ancient Thera at a small stone church, the inside of which barely has enough head room to stand. At first I think this is the extent of the ruins.

But I notice a path continuing  around the north side of the mountain. Again I ascend a  set of switchbacks, crossing isolated monuments to various Greek gods. Spread all along the top of the mountain overlooking the sea far below are the vast ruins of ancient Thera. The ruins run along the narrow mountaintop which extends to the cliff. To the northeast, I see the town of Kemari with its black-sand beach where I started my ascent of the mountain. To the southwest is the town of Perissa with a single blue church dome at its center.

The ruins of ancient Thera consist of an agora, sanctuaries for Apollo, Dionysus and several other Greek gods, public buildings including a gym, private homes, and an ancient theatre by the cliff overlooking the sea.

This city was founded by Membliarus under the orders of Kadmos when he was wandering about Greece looking for Europa. It is also the city of Theras, the descendent of Oedipus who generations later came seeking to be king.

The wind howls, rakes the mountainside. The sparse trees are bent, limbs are combed in the direction of the wind. I reach the end of the peninsula and start back on the west side of the mountain, passing more ruins.

I find a place shielded from the wind next to a group of college-age kids, Americans in shorts sitting on a ledge eating and talking. I eat my chewy honey-dipped donut laced with sugar granules and pull off my jacket. Even my black sweater feels too warm. The sun is blistering.

The coming of Theras to the island brought trouble, for the curse on the descendants of Oedipus was still active. All of Theras’ children died.[9] He journeyed to the oracle at Delphi and learned that to rid themselves of the curse, they must erect shrines to Laios and Oedipus. This Theras did, and henceforth his children lived. I have looked in vain for the sanctuary which Theras erected to Laios and Oedipus.

This business of curses which effect innocent children is disturbing. I’m sure Theras, if there was any heart within him at all, felt more than a little anguish over his own children dying. To feel that you are responsible for the death of children is a terrible burden, but to know you are and not know the cause would be unbearable. I have never been able to get over knowing I was the cause of my daughter’s disappearance.

On the trail down the mountain the wind is fierce, and I have to remove my clip-on sunglasses and eventually even my glasses because the wind blows sand and pebbles off the mountain into my face. I have my jacket on over my sweater again and wish for the down parka I left in Colorado. At the parking area, I’m glad to see my motorbike still standing, although another has been blown over and lays flat in the dirt dripping gasoline. I follow the cobblestone road back down the mountain, my idling motorbike taking the switchbacks easily, only the wind driving it off course. Back on the main road to Fira, the wind pressing against my face, driving my hair back, I see the vast bay to my left below the cliffs of the volcano on top of which I ride.

---

I sit in a restaurant at cliff-side having a chocolate-cake dessert and a cup of high-octane Greek coffee, looking out to sea, the sun gradually setting through rapidly moving clouds. Beams of the sunlight break through, spotlighting the surface of the sea like some mighty flashlight of the gods searching the caldera for something lost.

The cold iron cables for the cable cars glisten like silver threads dipping and bowing to the edge of the sea. I hear a clatter below me and peer over the edge to see a train of donkeys, their hooves scraping the stone walkway. It’s still cold, although the pension owner has told me there are ten days of good weather coming. This is my last evening in Santorini. I can use the warm weather in Crete.

2 Nov, Tuesday

I rise early and talk to the owner of the pension who today has taken a bath, shaved and looks like a prosperous businessman. He wears a crisp white shirt and slacks. He complains about a meeting with his attorney, how the attorney keeps him in trouble. He tells me I can catch the bus to the ferry at one o’clock in the center of town. As I leave the pension, I hear the pale horse and take one more glance in his direction.

I return my motorbike at the rental agency maintenance building where it is inspected for damage. A middle-aged American who looks like a retired surfer, long blond hair and weathered skin, gives my motorbike a clean bill of health.

On the way to the bus, lumbering under my heavy pack again, I pass fishermen at the side of the road selling their catch in cardboard boxes, large silvery fish, squid, an octopus. Some sit cleaning the nets and arguing with their neighbors. They’re a tall thin people with grizzly, unshaven faces. The fishy smell of their catch fills the air. I’m reminded of Jesus’ words to the brothers Peter and Andrew, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”

The boundary between Greek mythology and religion is not so clean as is daily life and religion in modern society. Upon death, many of the ancient Mycenaeans ascended to become gods themselves. Some were whisked away to Greek heaven. Oedipus was one of these. He ascended (or perhaps descended) to the land if the Furies.

My maternal grandparents were extremely religious and toward the end of their lives, we heard rumors they would not die but be taken directly into heaven, simply vanish from the surface of the earth, as did Oedipus. I attended both their funerals so if they ascended, it was spiritually not bodily. There are, however, also reports of Oedipus’ funeral, a pyre, his gravesite at the Areopagos in Athens.

I sit at the pier awaiting the ferry to Crete. The wind has calmed although the gentle breeze feels cool in the shade. This place sure runs hot and cold. When the ferry arrives, I board the ferry but have to wait a half hour before we depart. Two small islets in the middle of the caldera are visible from the ferry. Both islets are made of black volcanic rock, the largest, Nea Kameni is flat across its surface with its edges dropping into the sea.

The ferry leaves dock and drifts toward Nea Kameni then turns south toward Crete. Thera moves along the left side of us. Soon we pass its southern tip and Aspro drifts by on the right. It’s a wonderful sight.

As Nea Kameni passes, I see light brown spots on its side where earth shows through the black rocks like sunlight, but Palea Kameni is solid black. Aspro comes up on the right. The top half is light colored because it’s obviously the original soil before the eruption that destroyed the island. We pass over the underwater part of the caldera. I see the southern tip of Thera to my left, the sun ahead of us, the bright light rippling on the water. To my right, drifting slowly past is Aspro. I may be leaving but what is going on inside this volcano is not over yet.

We’re several miles out to sea. 

Santorini is just a faint blue mist with the white cities on the mountaintops, like frosting on chocolate cake. I look over the side of the boat and I swear I have never seen water so blue, deep navy blue.

When the people of Akrotiri fled the island, it was under much more dramatic circumstances. The city had been destroyed by a tremendous earthquake, and the volcano was spewing fumes and lava. I imagine the rumble of the volcano coming from the bowels of the earth and the landscape trembling as they loaded the boats, smoke billowing from the volcano, a fine dry mist of ash falling, the cries of children, the screams of women and frantic, panic-stricken shouts of men.

| Top |