(Click on thumbnail for a larger version of the photo and more details. For a "slide show," click on first thumbnail, then use arrows to move between photos.)The late-afternoon sun creates dramatic shadows as it hits the bells of a Santorini church.
A view of Ia, with its whitewashed houses and blue-domed churches.
Ia, on the northwest tip of Santorini, is perhaps the island's most attractive village.
The windmill and white houses of Ia.
Sometimes a donkey is the best way to get luggage up Ia's steep, stepped lanes.
The village of Ia after sunset.
A donkey driver takes his animals home after a day of work.
Donkeys carry tourists between the Fira port and the town.
Tourists walk under the arches of Fira's Roman Catholic cathedral.
Potted plants, flowers and Greek vases are typical decorations for Santorini's houses.
The village of Imerovigli spreads along a volcano's caldera.
Dancing the night away at Murphy's in downtown Fira.
The stores lining Fira's narrow streets stay open late into the evening.
A tourist boat heads away from Nea Kameni island.
Tourists listen to their guide as they stand on the rim of Santorini's still-active volcano on Nea Kamena.
Tourists walk along the edge of a volcano crater on Nea Kamena.
Two Spanish tourists dig up hot rocks on Santorini's Nea Kameni volcano.
Tourists check out the exhibits in Fira's Megaron Gyzi museum.
Inside "Nikolas", probably the most popular eatery in Fira.
A boat sits on the roof of a Santorini building.
The domed roof of Fira's Roman Catholic cathedral.
One of the many colorful churches of Santorini.
A Santorini still-life.
The island of Santorini is a photographer's dream.
A Santorini still-life.
A couple of cats take an afternoon nap on a table and chair during off-hours at a Santorini jazz club.
This is what I thought about Santorini before I ever arrived: It was swank. That, and white and blue.
You could sense these things even from the sea. The tumbled-marble-over-leaden-mountain look of the island’s buildings implied that the place would be spendy. And like any upstanding Greek island, we could see the place’s sheen of solar-white walls and wet-blue church domes.
But I wasn’t prepared for what we found on the shore.
Gangs. Stubbled men with cigarettes and maps, haggling and howling. Rental car here. Hotel, hotel. We didn’t bite, though. We just went to a visitor agency at the pier. They sorted things.
So we were in a taxi next, careening this way and that, James Bond-bloody-car-chase style, up the front of the black mountain and toward the sun-bleached summit with its hotels and cafés. It was all pretty much like Italy and its Capri, I thought — despite those cliché colors of Greece. I wondered what that was all about. Blue and white. Everything. Maybe it was some sort of patriotism. Ever see the flag?
Up top, tourists huffed and puffed through the main town and its cliff-clinging maze. I looked down. There was a hotel that occupied, what, four or five descending tiers of the mountain? A rambling staircase went from level to level, and each had a patio with a view of the still, metallic sea. Swank.
It was during one of these maze ambles that I first noticed the lazy sound. Conk, conk, conk. I looked toward the source. I only saw a guy with a baseball cap.
Then, they came in all their sweat-baked splendor. Donkeys.
Of course. You can ascend and descend Santorini’s heights only a handful of ways: cars, gondolas, your own two feet — or by donkey.
The problem is, the last two options share the same route. I decided to walk down the sharp slant of Santorini only once.
You are constantly tormented by the omnipresent ass. Round every bend, there’s a donkey — one’s rear domain, one charging straight toward you. The leather-faced donkey keepers, the men who charge money for you to ride the beasts up and down, scold you for not taking their sensible option.
I was almost at the end of this miserable, dung-dodging journey when a woman rounded the corner atop an ass. I went left. She mirrored me. I went right. Ditto.
The damned donkey was trying to kill me.
“They go where they wanna go,” the rider said, a sharp American nasal quality in the accent.
So dirty soles and sore ankles are all you get. So everything isn’t swank.
Sometimes Santorini is downright surreal. Not long after my initial confrontation with donkeys, I lounged in an outdoor café. There came the wheeze of a squeeze box, and a procession marched down the street, led by the accordion and followed by a Japanese couple, arm-in-arm, followed by a gaggle of photographers. Newlyweds.
We saw this more than once.
This may seem an unlikely description of fantasy island. But the thing you must realize is that Santorini is magnificent, dark and jutting, and at the same time it’s fallen. There are more Yanks and Brits and Germans than Greeks, or at least it seems that way, and this creates a strange sort of unreal reality.
I gave in to this almost immediately. I did the ultimate tourist thing. I visited an Irish pub (actually, I visited two).
In the first and busiest, photographer Michael Abrams and I found ourselves awash in the brick-in-the-washing-machine clank of techno pop. The USS Anzio had been here, a sticker declared. Another decal represented Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron Light 43, Detachment 5, otherwise known as The Fighting Amish.
The tip jar in the place cleverly begged, “New livers are expensive in Greece.”
In this pub there was this Australian guy, all bleached hair and beach-baggy pants, and he was twirling this blonde across the floor.
This went on for a sweaty long while.
He eventually unreeled her, her eyes bright as Christmas lights. The Australian walked up to a man, a Brit his dance partner apparently knew.
“How long have you known her?” Bleach Boy asked.
“I’ve known her for years,” the man answered. “She’s my wife.”
The next day I returned to this place in the early evening — no disco, no tourists. Just this barmaid named Anna, a local woman who swore a fair amount and seemed worried about her weight. That, and the mercurial nature of her Murphy’s clientele.
You know, she said, I used to get to know these people. Not anymore. She loves 5 percent of them still, these vagabond tourists. She hates 20 percent, the drunken ugly-foreigner-demanding type. The rest, they just come and go.
It used to break her heart when people left. Now she knows better — don’t chat up, don’t be chatted up. Not that she minds the tourists really. They buy her pints, they tip her tips, and they provide for this entire isle. But in the end, they all go away.
This whole scene, despite its being set on a marine jewel trampled by lovely girls and dappled in sunlight, brought me down initially. Not because of its splendor, but because of how far the place had gone to hawk it: The penguin painted on the laundry place, each flipper holding half of a bikini. The scooter rental place that declared, The boss is crazy. You rent two bikes, you take one free. And the donkeys and the donkey-renters.
It was as if whatever this place was, it had ceased to be that in order for me to go there and enjoy it. Drachmas long gone, in exchange for foreign gold — or make that shiny new euros. And around every corner, you’ll find the same ceramic dolphin for sale.
Santorini has been international for a long, long time. A nook of a museum is full of rationale for the place’s Italian feel and Italian name. Venetians roosted here once, back in their maritime heyday. The museum is full of old documents in Latin and Italian, even Catholic church papers in this, such an Orthodox country.
But one gets the idea that the Venetians, in all their imperialism, didn’t place the demands upon Santorini that the global tourist does. I’m sure I saw Judi Dench there even, looking like she hoped no one would figure her out.
Yet Santorini still shows flashes of purity.
The still-living allure of the place grows brighter at night. One evening I found myself on the main drag of the maze. I was looking up at the changing sky, from day to night. In the summer, or even early fall, Santorini’s sun sets with a fight. Before it’s drowned out, it reflects its final fires onto the sea, and even high above you can feel the flash against your face.
Even the gray days are epic: the sky the color of clam chowder but rent with a solar dagger. It looks like some biblical shaft, a revelation stabbing into the water's polished silver. The surface sparks with flecks from lights above.
The tourists can’t sabotage that.
And it makes you realize: Santorini is about change. Rising and falling. Creation and destruction.
The island is actually reputed to be the lost continent of Atlantis, blown into mythology in 1450 B.C. The mountain blew its top, literally, leaving a void in the center of the island. The sea rushed in to fill the former summit. The resulting tidal wave rushed all the way to Crete, drowning the Minoans.
What’s left of Santorini looks like a crowned head. The island fragments, the rim of the blown mountain, form the perimeter. The king’s skull now rises from the center of this ring, the building cone of a new volcano — Santorini’s struggle to recover from its own tantrum. Like a phoenix.
We went there, Mike the photog and I. We stepped into a boat with the tanned tourists and set out to find the secret of this microcosm of the universe-blowing, expanding — a regular Stephen Hawking lecture.
So we were soon in that song by The Police, “Walking on the Moon.” That’s what the volatile center is like, a pitted landscape of charcoal dusted in sulfur.
A tour guide went through the whole catastrophic history, right through Santorini’s devastating earthquake of 1956.
I asked the tour guide when Santorini will blow next.
“This one might take centuries to build up enough energy to blow up again, but no one knows,” was the reply.
And what if it blows, well, next month?
“Then we’ll have to find another island.”
One man in particular wouldn’t leave. He is Christoforos Assimis, a pleasant-faced painter, his face framed in silver-white whiskers.
I met him by accident. I wandered into an art gallery on the main island, and there they were: gentle pastel paintings, acrylic-on-canvas, the expected ivories and cobalts but also flashes of fire and earth and even steely green-gray in the skies and seas.
An assistant was there. She explained that Christoforos did all these paintings.
“He did also the frescoes in the cathedral,” continued this gallery manager, Fofo Damigou.
“His paintings are in many private collections everywhere in the United States and Europe … he is the only local painter. He was born here. He loves this island very much, and the light is very special.”
Then in walked Christoforos himself. He said he was 57. And in the time that he’s been on earth, his island has changed.
“It’s too much touristic now,” he told me. “I wanted to paint the real Santorini. This aesthetic has a power — the light, the color, the forms.”
I was beginning to see. And as this vision became clearer, the things that had initially annoyed me suddenly made me somber. The cruise ship Germans, the barroom Brits. They were fun. I was having a helluva time. But though Santorini’s vision seemed to endure despite this party, it also seemed to dim because of it. Like a young beauty out too late, having had too much to drink.
One day, I looked down from the labyrinth height of Fira to the sea. There was this pattern in the water below, the wake of a newly anchored ship. It was incredible, the exact outline of a dolphin. Maybe 100 feet long. I motioned to Mike. He saw it, too. The pattern was a phantom, shimmering and distorting and expanding, then disappearing altogether. Maybe it was the same with Santorini.
Mike had grown weary of my criticisms — we had sun, we had fun — what do you want, kid? This all came to a head in a bar called The Tropical.
“All you’ve done is complain since you got here,” Mike said.
I mulled this over, and we argued it over, while he enjoyed what he dubbed “The Best Margarita on This Side of the Atlantic.”
He was probably right. The martini was damn good, too. The source of these fine drinks explained Santorini to us. Her name was Jeanne, an American, and she had lived there for 13 years. She had been a speech pathologist at an Indian reservation in New Mexico.
“I came here for a few summers. I wasn’t …” She paused. “I felt better here. I felt good. That’s it. I didn’t have any intention to move here.”
Mike and I both nodded with inebriated attention.
“Certainly there’s a vibe here, and the whole world comes to me. I have everything in a small place, and the best view in the world.”
We began talking about the dog sleeping in the bar. Sort of a largish Everydog, and that's meant in only the best way.
“Barbara Bush loves my dog,” Jeanne said. “Even though I didn’t like her son. She was here. Her and the big shrub.”
Who needs Judi Dench?
I would think about this, as well as Jeanne’s colleague, a beautiful barmaid from Newcastle, as we headed away on the hydrofoil. Santorini had tourists and booze and was fallen. But we had fallen in love with it, as you do with beauties, even those who stay out too late and have too much too drink.
Santorini shrank away in the distance. Soon we passed smaller islands and rocks and we picked up speed on our way to Athens. Eventually, lulled into understanding by exhaust and vibration, I at least had a single answer to a single question.
As I gazed aft, the hydrofoil was just clearing this jutting rock, a spear of an island peak. The rock dropped directly behind us — sharp, sheer, strong.
And connecting us, linking hydrofoil with stone, was the whitest and wildest foam. And bordering that, all around us, was the deepest jeweled blue.
It was then that I knew. I understood why the buildings were all white and blue.
If you go ...
Where
Santorini, officially known as Thira, is the most southern of Greece’s Cyclades islands. It is closer to Iraklion on Crete than it is to Athens, the Greek capital.
When to go
Santorini can be visited year round, however much of the island is closed from November to March. High season is July and August, when the island overflows with tourists and the hotel and car-rental prices can double. The best time to visit is from late April to the end of June and September to mid-October.
How to get there
¶ By boat: From June through September there are ferries from Piraeus daily, and three to six times a week from Iraklion. The nine-hour trip from Piraeus costs about 18 euros. The high speed catamaran takes half the time, but at 38.50 euros costs more than double. From Iraklion, the ferry takes almost four hours and costs about 12 euros. Here again, the catamaran halves the time but doubles the cost (24.90 euros). October through May, the ferries are less frequent.
Unless you’re pressed for time, consider taking a standard ferry instead of the catamaran. The catamarans are very fast, but you’re not supposed to stand on deck. The Santorini caldera is impressive enough that you will want to see it from deck as you arrive. Also, the catamarans may be convenient but they don’t have much nautical character. It’s more like flying on an airline, cramped seats and all.
¶ By plane: Olympic Airlines, the Greek national carrier, has daily flights from Athens to Santorini for about 85 euros. A couple of flights a week fly the Iraklion-Santorini route and cost about 60 euros. There are also connections to and from islands of Rhodes and Mykonos.
Where to stay
Hotels, except during the high season, seem very easy to find. The port area swarms with guys hawking taxis, rental cars, hotels and whatever else you may need, but the best thing to do is visit the tourist bureaus. They are impossible to miss after you come off the ferry or catamaran.
Accommodations can be fairly inexpensive, depending upon where you stay. Though great sums of jet-setter cash can be spent here, a nice room with air conditioning can be had for $40 or $50 per night. Just be willing to walk a little bit out of the center of town.
Hotels with a view of the caldera will be more expensive, figure between 85 and 120 euros for a double, but if you can afford it, the view is worth it. On the low end, the Thira Youth Hostel has dorm beds for about 11 euros.
Getting around
The cheapest and easiest way to get around Santorini is by bus. In the tourist season, buses leave the Fira station regularly for the towns of Ia, the village and ruins of Akrotiri and the beach resorts of Perissa and Kamari. Be prepared to be packed into the busses like sardines. Tickets cost between 80 euro cents and 1.20 euros.
There are car-rental shops at the port, the airport and in Fira. Depending on the season and demand, be prepared to pay between 25 and 50 euros a day.
Motor scooters are also for hire in town, and might be the most fun way to see the island. No matter what you drive, be careful, as the Santorini roads are narrow.
Food
Greek food is sometimes greasy but nearly always great, particularly the island fish. Expect all the usual Greek staples, too — mousakas and vine leaves and stiff coffee — though meat is more of a mainland offering. A specialty of Santorini is pseftokeftedes, a puff made of flour, tomatoes and spices, then deep fat-fried.
Sometimes the best places are small, though not always. Look before you accept the friendly invite of the waitress standing out front of the one of the smallest places. They may not actually have a free table for you, and expect you to wait for a space so tight that it’s nearly impossible to sit.
A longtime Santorini favorite is Taverna Nikolas, down the street from Murphy’s Irish pub and opposite the Kira Thira bar. Nikolas will have to tell you what the specialties of the day are, as the restaurant’s only menu is the blackboard above the kitchen door, and it is in Greek. They serve delicious traditional food here, and sometimes the line of customers waiting for a table snakes out the door and up the street.
On the Web
Here are some Web sites with information on Santorini:
¶ www.santorini.net
¶ www.santorini.com
¶ www.greekislands.com/santorini
¶ http://agn.hol.gr/hellas/cyclades/santorin.asp.
— Michael Abrams and Ward Sanderson
