I have a song working in my head that once completed will be published about Santorini, but well, for now it’s plain text:)
What a beautifully unique place! Santorini as we know it today is a Greek island in the Aegean Sea that was formed by a large volcanic eruption that destroyed the previous civilization living there. Now, it is the largest island of a circular archipelago that has remnants of a volcanic caldera. The island isn’t your typical flat land island. It is a mountain jutting from the sea with what looks like snow on top. Upon closer inspection the “snow” are the little towns sprinkled along the top of the mountain.
Because of it’s volcanic history (pun intended) the land of Santorini is rich and fertile and very diverse! Black lava rock, red clay and white pumice stone are visible around just about every corner etched into the land. Homes in fact used to be built out of cooled black lava rock, which made them somewhat invisible to travelers coming by sea. A clever way to be invisible to your enemy in my opinion. However, in the 1930’s the government made it law that each structure had to be painted white because it keeps the homes cooler and saves on energy.
While the Island itself is not all THAT attractive, the towns are absolutely adorable!!! The rest of the island is rugged, rocky and not terribly interesting. However due to the fertile nature of the volcanic rock, a large variety of produce are grown there. The most popular of course, is wine:) Part of the tour we took included a winery tour where we were able to sample the various wines and even purchased several to take back with us. Growing grapes on Santorini is a bit trickier than one would think however. Due to the ferocious winds Santorini is plagued by quite often, vines are not able to grow upright as in a normal vineyard. Instead, people train the vines to grow in circular nests or baskets on the ground so they aren’t damaged by the winds!
Along with the hard winds, Santorini rarely gets any rain. Water is a HUGE commodity and isn’t to be wasted at all. The lack of rain is why their wines also have such a distinctive taste (the grapes are very concentrated due to lack of water). The lack of rain has even inspired how the buildings are built. One will notice 2 kinds of ceilings on buildings in Santorini: a flat roof and a circular or arched roof. The flat ones are designed to collect rainwater that then gets funneled to an underground cistern, while the arched/circular roofs are the best design for buildings to withstand earthquakes… Yes, they have earthquakes too on top of the lack of rain and violent winds and there is still that volcanic caldron to think about… Sounds like a rough life to me, what with having to battle nature in so many different ways!
While wine, capers and olives are among the favorite products of Santorini, their favorite and most revered animal is the donkey. They love their donkeys!! Several statues of the honored donkey can be found in every town, and several times over. They are working donkeys of course but are well taken care of and once they are of retirement age, they even have a proper retirement home for them to live out their lives. Too cute, I love it!! One of the ways to get back down from the town to sea was via a donkey ride:) I was absolutely on board to do that, however our tour guide made a mention that the donkey’s aren’t really a fan of it, so I decided to spare the donkey a trip down the rugged terrain (sigh). Dogs are also very popular on the island and seem to run the place. It reminded me of dogs in Costa Rica- how they do what they want during the day, but have a place and home to go to at night.
We wandered around Thera after our tour of Oia and the winery and stopped for some lunch at Arcobaleno. The food was delicious and the view was unbeatable as it was overlooking the center of the archipelago where the volcano remnants remain. I had a beer filtered with volcanic rock called Volcan while my parents and sister had wine. And of course, since I was in Greece I had to have a teeny bottle to Ouzo to finish off the meal:) From there we did some more shopping for gifts and such, had a pedicure at the Dr. Fish Spa where they use cleaner fish to nibble off all the dead skin, then had one more drink and a wee dessert (baklava anyone?) before taking the tram back to the loading area for the small boats to take us back to the ship.
Oh, one last interesting story about Santorini: the poor houses. Wealth was signified not by the kind of house you had (large or small) but rather by how much land you owned. So those who weren’t wealthy, instead of having homes on land lived in homes carved out of the rock along the top edge of Santorini. Looking at the pictures of Oia and Thera, you can see how many of the homes are practically on top of each other and built right on the edge of the land. These were the homes for poor people. Today of course, these homes are worth millions of dollars… Go figure!
Oh, Greeks also love their churches. If memory serves, people in the town were allowed to build their own churches and name them in honor of a Saint (each church was in honor of a different Saint). While the churches weren’t used every day or week, when the day came around to honor whatever Saint was associated with their church, the church owner would give it a face life, clean it up and invite the town to the church to celebrate the Saint. Lovely:)
Last, last thing… There are actually ruins that were discovered on Santorini from the previous civilization (the one wiped out by the volcano eruption) and it has been compared to Pompeii… We didn’t have time to look into that further but it’s certainly a reason to go back:)
Ramblintraveler 