The Monk Seal Conspiracy

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14. The Ghosts of Atlantis

After the concert I fled to Santorini for a few days’ rest, grateful to leave the belching smog and the stinking harbour and industries of Pireus behind me as the steamer moved out into the clarity of the Aegean.

Santorini is perhaps one of the most fascinating islands in the Aegean, lying some 100 kilometres north of Crete in the Cyclades archipelago. Almost 3,500 years ago, a massive volcanic holocaust shattered the island. In its wake, it left only the broken rim of a giant crater wall and, buried under the dust, the intriguing remains of a lost civilization. An outlandish and desolate impression greets the sea-borne visitor to this crescent-shaped island. Gashed cliffs of stratified lava tower out of a cobalt-blue sea and dwarf approaching ships. As we sailed into the island’s ancient volcanic heart, reputed to be the largest marine caldera in the world, the sea seemed to glow like a dark sapphire, suddenly charged with an almost sinister turbulence.

There is something unnerving and inexplicable in the strange soul of this island, a sense of tragedy and foreboding. Here on Santorini, the inhabitants still believe in ghosts. Some are even said to hear the forlorn and unearthly whispers of the lost souls of Atlantis, Plato’s mystical and legendary island. Santorini is also believed to be the only roost of the vampires of Greece, wretched beings neither dead nor alive. Their apparitions are said to take the form of pale, wailing corpses from which the tormented spirit is still struggling to emerge. But perhaps they are only the inconsolable ghosts of Atlantis, unable to bear the destruction of their sacred island.

Steaming on for the harbour, we passed the small town of Oia on the northern horn of the island, whitewashed adobe-like houses perched high on honeycomb cliffs of reddish-brown lava and pumice. Strung across the crater wall riddled with caves, the clustered houses, ruined shells and superstitious churches of Oia look down anxiously on the caldera, a sheer drop of some 300 metres. In the centre of the lagoon, enclosed by the giant pincers of the crater wall, lie the Burnt Islands of solidified lava, like huge piles of coal.

Santorini’s affluent capital, Thera, rises in a semicircle of white cubic houses, terraces with vivid cascading flowers, barrel-vaulted roofs, domes and bell towers across the indented summit of the crater wall. With its breathtaking views, its tourist boutiques and restaurants, Thera has become a Mecca for cruise liners plying the eastern Mediterranean. Unable to dock at the town’s small quay at the foot of the cliffs, ships anchor out in the lagoon and flotillas of small caiques ferry the tourists back and forth. With the daunting view of Thera perched so high on the crater wall above, the tourists, against their better judgement, are mounted on mules to make the steep and perilous ascent. Brandishing their goads, the mule-drivers lash the animals up the 600 serpentine steps to the town. The tourists can often be heard uttering cries of dismay, suddenly finding themselves perched over the precipice as the mules take the widest track around the hairpin bends. Beaten mercilessly, the mules’ wretched existence is justified by folklore which suggests that they are possessed by the souls of the dead, and that the serpentines are their purgatory.

From Thera’s highest point, the conical shape of Santorini’s ancient volcano can be seen more distinctly. From the cliffs overlooking the caldera, the island’s terrain gradually slopes back across a dusty plain, down to the eastern coastal shores of Perissa, Kamari and Monolithos with their black volcanic sands. Of Santorini’s 8,000 inhabitants, most are fishermen and farmers, their lives still steeped in tradition and rustic simplicity. Many seals must have lived and played around these shores in ancient times, but today there are scarcely any left, the fishermen bearing an all too common hostility towards them as the sea loses its fertility and they lose their only livelihood.

Farming families can be seen in the pumice-littered fields, tilling the parched volcanic soil or tending the peculiar nest-shaped vines of the island, oblivious to the ancient houses, streets and temples buried beneath their feet.

The Burnt Islands and the caldera of Santorini.

In 1960 the Greek seismologist, Dr Angelos Galanopoulos, announced his ingenious and controversial theory that Santorini, together with the Minoan culture of Crete, was the grave of the lost continent of Atlantis. 1,500 years before Christ, he said, the luminous civilization was snuffed out by a volcanic holocaust as cataclysmic as a nuclear war. The eruption of Santorini’s giant volcano tore the island apart with such ferocity that its high marble mountains collapsed, and the resulting tidal wave drowned the Minoans of Crete.

The traditionally conservative archaeological community greeted the theory with scepticism and hoots of ridicule. And although startling discoveries on Santorini eventually prompted many respected archaeologists to embrace the hypothesis, Plato’s Atlantis has yet to be resurrected from over 2,000 years in the realms of myth. According to Dr Galanopoulos, Atlantis became a commonwealth of islands led by Minoan Crete with Santorini as its cultural and spiritual centre. Of course, the island must have been a far cry from what it is today. In his Critias, Plato described the metropolis as lush and fertile, with lakes, meadows and rivers, and ‘trees of wonderful height and beauty’. Like the Minoans, the Atlanteans had no wish to fortify their towns and villages. Crafting an imaginative and advanced civilization, their devotion to both spiritual and sensual values was reflected in their artistic skill and their worship of mother Earth.

In ancient times, Greece was an important bridge and meeting point between East and West. The Atlantean-Minoan civilization became a fusion of the influences of both, the Eastern holistic symbolism of the Earth mother coalescing with the individualism of the West. But perhaps it was the growing antagonism of these influences which finally led to the demise of the civilization, the Minoans’ peaceful Egyptian and Asian origins being overwhelmed by the aggressiveness of the northern mainland states, like the Mycenean Greeks of European stock, which were constantly at war with each other, and obsessed with conquest and piracy. In time, the peaceful Earth mother of the Oriental culture became poisoned with corruption and hypocrisy. The Atlanteans fell headlong into their tragic and jingoistic decline.

‘For many generations,’ Plato wrote, ‘as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws and well-affectioned to the god, whose seed they were, for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom… They despised everything but virtue… thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them. But when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and for him who had an eye to see, grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but for those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.’ Critias then goes on to say that Zeus, angered by the Atlanteans’ evil decline, called the gods of Olympus together to address them. Ominously, the text of Critias as it has came down to us then breaks off in the middle of a sentence.

It was about 1500 BC that the island was destroyed in a massive volcanic eruption. Seismologists estimate that the force of the disaster was equivalent to the destructive power of a 20 megaton H-bomb. Certainly, hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and cities and towns as far away as mainland Greece and Turkey devastated by massive tidal waves, torrential rains and savage storms. It has even been postulated that the catastrophe gave rise to the twelve plagues described in Exodus, and in the aftermath a vast area would indeed have suffered from flood and drought, pestilence, strange and erratic behaviour of animals, hail, firestorms and ‘death of the firstborn’. Ships would have been sunk by the ferocity of the sea or thrown miles inland. Even cities and towns on higher ground would have been torn apart and demolished by earthquakes. Volcanic ash would have blackened the sky, turning day into night, almost like a nuclear winter. Volcanic thunder would have cracked over the Aegean, the pitch darkness seared by a frenzy of magnetic lightning.

The eruption of Thera was five times as powerful as that of Krakatoa in 1883 – and even then, the terrific roar was heard over 3,000 kilometres away and the blast wave shattered windows and cracked walls 250 kilometres from its epicentre. The sky was blacked out to a radius of 400 kilometres from the eruption, and ash clouded the sky up to ten times this distance. The tidal wave was 15 metres high and drowned over 30,000 people in neighbouring Java and Sumatra. From the Theran eruption, ash fell as far away as Egypt and Sudan, and the tidal wave almost certainly drowned the Minoans of Crete. One can only imagine their fear and panic and how the final paroxysm of their beloved Atlantis terrified and deafened them, the rain and hail lashing down, the poison from the sky blinding and suffocating them, killing their families, their animals and crops.

The lost civilization is now buried under a so-metre blanket of volcanic ash, and archaeological excavations could take hundreds of years. Dr James W. Mavor of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the USA was instrumental in efforts to prove the Galanopoulos theory. In his book Voyage to Atlantis he describes how some farming families were unable to work in the fields because of ghosts. Once, before dawn, a farmer went into his field to pick tomatoes, and saw a luminous white light and a shimmering quintessence in the vicinity of the excavations. He then saw many ghosts flocking out of the unearthed houses and streets, moving towards the west to escape the sunrise and the unbearable light of day. They could no longer return to their graves. The excavations uncovered rare treasures, most of which are now held in Athens at the National Museum. But at Akrotiri, ancient streets and squares can be seen, a blacksmith’s shop and well-preserved two and three storey houses with earthenware waste pipes built into the walls. Inside, many household articles were discovered: looms, wooden furniture, bedsteads, bronze lamps, rush mats and baskets, lead weights and even children’s toys. Other discoveries proved that the civilization cultivated wheat, fished with nets, pressed oil, used the potter’s wheel and built their houses of stone joined together by wooden dowels as a protection against earthquakes. Unlike Pompeii, no petrified human remains have been found, suggesting that the inhabitants managed to escape the island before the final eruption, perhaps only to drown in the massive tidal wave which was to follow.

Most precious of the discoveries are the multicoloured frescoes depicting many different scenes and stories – a young naked fisherman, dolphins and antelopes, a scene celebrating spring with flowers and swallows, a tribe of monkeys, a Nile river scene, palm trees and a young priestess. Other surveys have discovered a Minoan riverbed, lakes and marshes, and have proved the prehistoric existence of fertile soil and lush vegetation. The northern channel or break in the crater wall between Oia and Therassia may have been the canal described by Plato, allowing ships to enter the heart of the island, into the incredible docks carved from white, black and red stone with arching roofs also formed out of native rock.

By 630 BC, however, there was only one tree left on the devastated island of Santorini. There were a few fitful eruptions and earthquakes over the following centuries. In 1573 the smaller of the Burnt islands broke water and more than a thousand animals were killed, mostly by poisonous gases. In 1650, the eruptions and earthquakes were more severe, and fifty people and another thousand animals were killed. The inhabitants were seized with excruciating pain in their eyes and most of the island remained blind for days. People died of the plague and the island was littered with the carcasses of dogs, cattle, sheep and birds.

Taking a caique from the port with a few other intrepid explorers, I set off for the Burnt islands, bracing myself to rock with the pendulum-like swell. The sea seemed dark and fathomless, and it hissed loudly against the caique’s hull. As the largest of islands loomed before us, it was as though we were suddenly dwarfed by its immensity, arriving at some strange and desolate planet. Massive boulders of solidified lava formed its ugly blackened shores.

We walked across lava bridges which traversed deep ravines, up scree and pumice dunes, over sharp and burnt-out rocks that cracked underfoot. We clambered around towering stacks of lava, some fractured and splintered, some almost resembling petrified human faces, hideously deformed. Waterless, lifeless desolation. Nothing but a few dry grasses and algae, its slopes scattered with stones and clinker, once spewed from the molten bowels of the Earth. Walking over this barren island was like stepping onto some distant asteroid or burnt-out planet. I imagined it under a pall of acrid smoke and wondered whether the Earth would also look like this after nuclear war.

Further on, the slopes of the island’s crater fell steeply from high and undulating ridges, the acrid smell of sulphur tainting the air and staining the rocks yellow. The core of the volcano, deep beneath the sea, is dormant, but there are deep rumblings sometimes, its drowsy but ominous warnings. Deep below, the volcano still mints its rainbow-coloured pumice which emerges bubbling through the turbulent waters around the island’s coasts. Fire and water, lava and sea, was it not these ancient elemental polarities that in primeval times coalesced to create amino acids, the first building blocks of life? This perhaps was the paradox of Nature’s rainbow, Nature’s balance between creation and destruction, inferno and flood.

Dare-devil houses and cave-like ruins still honeycomb the lower slopes of Oia. On a quiet night in April 1959 a violent earthquake wrenched the houses from their foundations and sent them tumbling into the sea far below, with sleeping families not even waking to meet their deaths. Only a handful of elderly and taciturn people now live amongst the scarred ruins, conscious of a ghostly presence, strange whispers and shadows. Every April, it is said, the ghosts return to haunt the town. The crooked pathways seem deserted except perhaps for the shrunken figure of an old woman swathed in the black clothes of widowhood, or an old farmer tugging a stubborn donkey into a parched field. A lingering taste of foreboding and uncertainty hangs over this ghost town of roofless shells, solitary gateways opening onto nothing but the fall to the sea, outside stairways ending brokenly, leading nowhere, sometimes with the number of the house still painted on the wall or gate. The wind sounds through the streets and moans over the exposed foundations overgrown with weeds, sometimes raising a little whirlwind of ghostly dust. At night, dim, flickering lights dust the precipice pathways, distant villages seem like constellations and buffeting gusts of wind make eerie and plaintive music through the tension of the wires laced across the crater wall.

Despite its brooding soul and ghostly countenance, Santorini is steeped in almost mystical paradox, exhilarating yet repressive, sinister yet pure, bizarre yet exotic, capricious yet tranquil. Over the centuries, animistic superstitions have coalesced with fervent Christian faith. At one time, there were even more churches than houses on the island, as though built to pacify and appease the gods, in earnest prayer that the sleeping and sometimes trembling dragon of the volcano will not wake from its fitful coma.

Is it only a haunting from the distant past, the ghost of mother Earth and the gods of Earth’s natural forces? As we reign supreme over Nature, the holocaust of Atlantis seems strikingly symbolic of our own ominous predicament. It is as though nuclear, 20th-century humans are also living in houses like these, perched on the edge of an abyss, almost as though we all harbour the same silent and superstitious faith that the terrible forces which our species has conjured up – perhaps jealous of the gods – will never be allowed to wake.

In the late afternoon, the Burnt islands are cast into stark silhouette against a sea of molten gold. Strange, as the sun goes down some of their shimmering inlets become like rivers and lakes and one can almost feel the presence of the distant past, see the marble temples on the green hillsides and the tall trees and streams, hear the echo of children playing in the streets…

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