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It is the southernmost member of the Cyclades group of islands, with an area of approximately 80 km˛ (30 sq mi) and in 2001 had an estimated population of 10,700. The inhabitants are citizens of Greece and speak Greek.
It is the most active volcanic centre in the Aegean Arc , though what remains today is largely a caldera. The name Santorini was given to it by the Venetians in the 13th century and it a reference to Saint Irene, before then it was called Kallisti or Thera.
Excavations starting in 1967 at the site called Akrotiri under the late Prof. Spyridon Marinatos have made Thera the best-known "Minoan" site off Crete, the homeland of the culture. The island was not called Thera at the time. Only the southern tip of a large town has been uncovered, yet it has revealed complexes of buildings, streets and squares, with remains of walls standing as high as 8 meters, all entombed in the solidified ash of the famous eruption of Thera. The site was not a palace-complex such as are found in Crete, but its excellent masonry and fine wall-paintings show that this was no conglomeration of merchants' warehousing either. A loom-workshop suggests organized textile weaving for export.
The oldest signs of human settlement are Late Neolithic ( 4th millennium BC or earlier), but ca 2000– 1650 BC Akrotiri developed into one of the Aegean's major Bronze Age ports, with recovered objects that had come not just from Crete but also from Anatolia, Cyprus, Syria and Egypt, from the Dodecanese and the Greek mainland.
Pipes with running water and water closets found on Thera are the oldest such utilities discovered.
Fragmentary wall-paintings at Akrotiri depict " SaffronFor the lead singer of Republica see Saffron Saffron is the name given to the dried stigmas and part of the style of the saffron crocus, traditionally called Crocus sativus which are harvested, dried, and used for cooking. Saffron has a pleasant spicy sme-Gatherers" who offer their crocusCrocus (plural: crocuses or croci) is a genus of perennial flowering plants that grows from a corm, growing naturally from the Aegean (where crocuses appear in Minoan frescos at Santorini), across Central Asia. Crocuses are placed botanically in the famil -stamens to a seated lady, perhaps a goddess; in another house two antelopes, painted with the kind of confident, flowing decorative, calligraphic line one might expect in a Persian manuscript; the famous fresco of a fisherman with his double strings of fish strung by their gills; the flotilla of pleasure boats, accompanied by leaping dolphins, where ladies take their ease in the shade of light canopies. Everywhere in the frescos the viewer misses, perhaps with a sense of relief, the insistent mythological content of Greek or Christian decor.
The exact date of the Minoan eruption provides a fixed point for aligning the entire chronology of the 2nd millennium Aegean because evidence of it occurs throughout the region. Current opinion based on radiocarbon datingRadiocarbon dating is the use of a naturally occurring isotope of carbon in radiometric dating to determine the age of organic materials. Basics Carbon has two stable isotopes: carbon-12 (12C), and carbon-13 (13C). In addition, there are tiny amounts of t and other radiological and dendrochronologicalCheraw, South Carolina Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the method of scientific dating based on the analysis of tree ring patterns. This technique was invented and developed during the 20th century originally by A. Douglass, the founder of the Lab techniques indicate that it occurred between 1650 and 1598 BC.
After a series of warning earthquakes that were alarming enough for all the residents to pack up and move out, the eruption created a 100 to 150m high tsunamiA tsunami (from Japanese meaning wave in port (the term tidal wave is generally synonymous, but not in scientific usage, as tsunamis are not related to tides) is one or a series of waves that occur after an earthquake, seaquake, volcanic activity, slumps, that devastated the north coast of Crete, 70km (45 miles) away, and would certainly have eliminated every timber of the Minoan fleet along Crete's northern shore. On the island of Anaphi, 27 km to the east, pumice layers have been identified on slopes 250 meters above sea level. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean there are pumice deposits that could be caused by the Thera eruption [1]. Ash layers in cores drilled from the seabed in the 1960s suggest that the wind from the northwest blew the heaviest ashfall towards central and eastern Crete. The volume of ejecta is estimated to have been much more than four times what was blown into the stratosphere by Krakatau in 1883, a better-recorded event. Every human being, indeed every vestige of life, must have been eliminated or smothered in the ashfall, leaving an island that had essentially been sterilized.
The violent eruption was centred on a small island just North of the existing island of Nea Kameni in the centre of the caldera. The caldera itself was formed several hundred thousand years ago by collapse of the centre of a circular island caused by the emptying of the magma chamber during an eruption. It has been filled several times by ignimbrite since then and the process repeated, most recently 21,000 years ago.
Before the Minoan eruption, the caldera formed a nearly continuous ring with the only entrance between the tiny island of Aspronisi and Thera. The eruption destroyed the sections of the ring between Aspronisi and Therasia , and between Therasia and Thera, creating two new channels.
There is a deposit of white tephra from the eruption which is up to 60 metre thick overlaying the soil marking the ground level before the eruption. The layer is divided into three fairly distinct bands indicating different phases of the eruption. The eruption would have caused a significant climate upset for the eastern Mediterranean region. It was one of the biggest volcanic eruptions on Earth in the last few thousand years.
This cataclysm at Santorini is popularly regarded as the most likely source for Plato's literary parable of Atlantis, disregarded as a literary trope to advance a rhetorical argument. It was certainly the kind of event that changes human ideas of what the gods are capable of, if provoked.
In 1704 an undersea volcano breached the sea surface forming the current centre of activity at Nea Kameni, and eruptions centred on it continue — three times in the twentieth century, the last being in 1950. Santorini was also struck by a devastating earthquake in 1956. At some time in the future, it will undoubtedly erupt violently again.