The hottest arguments and the highest enthusiasms in archaeology today swirl round the small Aegean island of Santorini. There Professor Spyridon don Marinatos, director of the Greek Department of Antiquities, is digging up evidence to explain the downfall of the great Minoan civilization in the middle of the second millennium B.C. Former TIME Art Editor Alexander Eliot, who has also written extensively on Greek history and mythology, recently visited Santorini to tour the excavations. His report:
Sailing into Santorini's embrace, a traveler senses that the majestic scenery was created by incomprehensible forces. The most prominent feature of Santorini, also called Thera, is a lagoon some 37 miles in circumference. At the lagoon's center are two low burnt black mounds of smoking lava, one named Nea Kameni, the other Palaia Kameni. To the east, the cliffs of the main crescent-shaped body of land stand sheer out of the water to a height of almost a thousand feet. The bottom of the lagoon is a full thousand feet below. In fact the ship is sailing across the bowl of a still smoldering volcano.
Four thousand years ago, Santorini was a single mountainous mass, almost completely round. At that time, archaeology has shown, the island was inhabited by an exceedingly sophisticated race of men. To make their buildings somewhat elastic and therefore earthquake resistant, they set wooden pins in the corner joints of the stones. They cultivated the olive. They produced pottery similar to the products found in Knossos, the Minoan city on Crete 75 miles to the south. But by far the most amazing creations of the ancient islanders were their frescoes.
Some of the frescoes recently unearthed on Santorini and put on public display at the Archaeological Museum at Athens are shown on the following color pages. Beyond any doubt, they surpass all others found so far in the Mediterranean region. The frescoes of Knossos, for example, are less delicate and free, less motionful and rhythmical than these. As for the celebrated splendors of a later age found at Pompeii, they would seem dry and artificial if set side by side with the Santorini frescoes. These new discoveries show Bronze Age civilization at its peak. The doomed people of Santorini were obviously capable of creating heavenly images upon the earth. They appear to have been as thoroughly attuned to art as Americans are to technology.
What doomed them was a catastrophe that rose from the bowels of the earth. Some time about the year 1500 B.C., Santorini exploded. The whole center of the island blew skyhigh. Not long afterward the sea rushed in to fill the red-hot wound of the crater. These two events produced what may well have been the most vast and terrible natural disaster ever to take place in the time that human beings have existed on the earth.
By way of comparison, consider the explosion of Krakatau in the East
Indies in August of 1883. The shock wave cracked walls 100 miles away and traveled three times round the world. Debris suspended in the air turned day into night over a radius of 130 miles. Floating pumice up to 13 feet blanketed the sea.