Santorini

There is an island in the Aegean, about sixty miles north of Crete, called Santorini by most people, but called Thira by the Greeks. It had an even older name in antiquity, Strongili, which means round island. If you have visited Santorini, you know it is crescent shaped. That’s because around 1600 BC the island exploded in a volcanic eruption geologists peg at ten times stronger than the eruption of Krakatoa. The amount of ash thrown up into the atmosphere had a global impact on climate for decades. The ash that fell to ground all over the world provides an absolute chronological reference point for the date. The empty caldera stood suspended over an immense void for another century before collapsing under its own weight, sending a tsunami across the Mediterranean that changed the face of civilization, wiping out the inhabitants of the island and destroying the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, ending the dominance of Minoan civilization in the Aegean. Some say the ensuing flood is the seed of truth at the heart of the great flood in the book of Genesis. Archaeologists and sensationalists both wonder if the Minoan city on the island was Plato’s Atlantis.

What we do know is that a farmer noticed some building foundations in his field that had been exposed during a rare rainstorm. He reported them to the authorities and the next thing he knew, he had been thrown off his land and given a crummy Russian car to drive around as a taxi while Spiros Marinatos, the Greek Minister of Antiquities, reported to the world that the location of an ancient Minoan city on Santorini had been revealed to him in a dream, and that he was going to personally lead the excavations at Akrotiri. No! wait a minute! That’s not the official story. But it is what the taxi driver told me and he was backed up by his mother, uncles, and cousins when I went there in 1971 as part of Peter Throckmorton’s team to conduct an underwater archaeological survey of the waters surrounding the island. But it was complicated.

Marinatos wanted Throckmorton to do an underwater survey, but he didn’t want to pay for it. The Greek islands then, and maybe still today for all I know, were more like feudal societies with the Lord of the Island owning most of the land and having nearly complete political and economic control over every aspect of island life. On Thira, and I think I’ll call it that from now on, the hereditary power was held by the Nomikos family, who were also the third largest of the Greek shipping dynasties, after Onassis and Niarchos, and therefore very wealthy. The current head of the family, Petros Nomikos, wanted an underwater geological survey done of the island but was having difficulty finding someone qualified to do it, so he made a deal with Marinatos. He would fund the archaeological survey if we first completed his geological survey.

After we had arrived on the island by ferry and settled into a house Nomikos had provided near Akrotiri, we were invited to dinner at the Nomikos villa in the island’s main town, Fira.

Petros was a pretty smart guy. He had a Bachelor’s degree from a German university and a Harvard MBA. It was no wonder his family business was so successful. And while he spent much of his time running his shipping empire out of Piraeus, his heart and true home was still the island of Thira. Once we were seated at his massive dining room table in the luxurious surroundings of his villa, he poured us all wine from his vineyards and began a long and increasingly fascinating tale of why he wanted an underwater geological survey of the island’s surrounds.

His story began with a 1961 earthquake that sealed off the aquifer that supplied the island with all its fresh water. There had been a devastating earthquake in 1956, and while the 1961 quake wasn’t as severe, the loss of the island’s water was a huge economic blow. The island population had plummeted after the 1956 quake, and fell even further after the water disappeared, from about ten thousand in 1956 to around 1,500 by the time we arrived in 1971. I just checked, and the island’s permanent population is still around 1,500.

Nomikos wanted to save his island and stabilize its economy. The first thing he did was build a fleet of three ocean-going tugs to haul 100-meter-long rubber tubes of fresh water from the nearby island of Paros. The full bladders undulated along the surface as they were being towed and looked like sea serpents, so Nomikos named the tugs Drakon 1, 2, and 3. A fleet of Dragons! It was expensive. Very expensive. But at least there would be enough water to survive.

Next, he turned his attention to finding cash crops that could survive on the island’s almost non-existent rain. Luckily, there was usually a heavy morning dew. It was enough to sustain the vineyards in good years and they could get by with a little extra water in the difficult years. The challenge was to find other, more profitable crops that could do the same.

Nomikos believed in the superiority of German engineers and scientists, so he hired a team of German botanists to come and research suitable crops. After two years of work and at great expense, they recommended planting pistachio trees and building an export business for their nuts. Experiments had shown that pistachio trees would survive the harsh island climate up to the extreme of the theoretical hundred-year drought.

Nomikos build and populated a tree nursery and reached out to farmers all over the island. Plow under your vineyards, he said, and I will lend you pistachio saplings to plant instead. You will have better lives, he promised. It was Nomikos asking. He had been educated in Germany and at Harvard. Many of the islands farmers made what must have been an incredibly difficult choice to break with tradition that was older than the island’s recorded history and planted pistachio trees, and they did it just before the theoretical 100-year draught become a reality. All the pistachio trees died. The grape vines that had survived on the island for millennia endured.

Nomikos is not a man to give up. He knew that other islands had developed successful craft industries from local resources and he knew there was a breed of sheep on the island that was almost indestructible. I thrived on the island scrub and endured its hot summers. Nomikos had a vision of women all over the island knitting and weaving clothing and tapestries from their wool. But there was a problem. The native breed’s wool was for shit. It was short, tight, course, and wiry. You couldn’t make anything out of it.

So what did he do? He hired a team of German animal husbandry experts to develop a hybrid between the native sheep and the Swiss Marino sheep, who have the most marvelous wool in the world. He built a large, air conditioned barn for his breeding stock of Marinos, because the island heat would kill them otherwise. They couldn’t survive on the island scrub, so he had rich, green alfalfa flown in by helicopter from the mainland every week. And they succeeded! Well, almost. They did produce a hybrid. Problem was it had the fleece of the native sheep and the stomach of the Swiss sheep. Useless. The entire output of the experiment was a single pull-over sweater which had been lost by the time we arrived. I do at least hope there had been some good mutton stews.

Undeterred, Nomikos turned his attention to the island’s geological resources. Thira is a volcano. The igneous rock is rich in iron, and the island has some black beaches because of it, but not so rich as to be worth mining the sands. The island is also buried under massive amounts of volcanic ash, only a few meters thick in some places, and a kilometer thick in others. This “Tuff” as it’s called, is a valuable resource. There is a steady demand for it in making fertilizer and building insulation. But through some long-standing business arrangement with strong political and legal overtones that were not fully explained to us, the island did not derive a single drachma of benefit from the tuff mining operation.

It was fascinating to watch in action though. Bulk cargo ships would pull up to the base of the cliff inside the volcano’s caldera; panels and chutes were attached to the cliff face to direct the ash into the ship’s open cargo holds. Then dynamite charges were set off and an avalanche of tuff would tumble down the cliff face straight into the ship’s holds. All to no benefit of the island or its population.

So what did Nomikos do? He hired a team of German geologists to scour the island for any other commercial mineral resources.

It’s odd because for the first time since the German occupation of the island during the war, Germans were allowed to see the hidden base of the island’s resistance fighters. There were tunnels and chambers carved out of the ash throughout the cliff face and under the town of Fira, and the main entrance to this labyrinth was in the Nomikos winery, adjacent to the villa. One of the giant oak wine casks is actually fake. The face swings open to reveal the entrance to a tunnel and a stairway descending into the depths of the ash.

Nomikos was concerned the geologists might be mistaken for treasure hunters as they dug for geological samples around the island. Since Britain’s Lord Elgin stole the stone carvings off the Acropolis frieze and shipped them off to England, there has been a high degree of paranoia throughout Greece when it comes to foreigners digging up and slinking away with their ancient artifacts and architectural wealth. They have good reason. There has always been and continues to be looting of artifacts throughout the Mediterranean, middle east, Asia, and south and north America for that matter. These treasures are in high demand.

Nomikos decided to hide the geologists from view as much as possible, so he had them set up their analytical laboratory in the underground tunnels. We were given a tour after our dinner. It was surreal. The steep staircase descending from the wine vat eventually leveled out and led to a large and well-lit chamber that looked like the set of a James Bond film. There was all the laboratory glassware you would expect to see as well as an atomic absorption spectrophotometer, rock grinders, polishers, an X-ray spectrophotometer, and other things I couldn’t identify. A shelving system along one wall held the specimens. More tunnels ran off in different directions, and I was told one of them descended all the way down the caldera to sea level.

I was eighteen years old and wanted to run off and explore every inch of the maze! But I was there representing Throckmorton, so I just enjoyed the moment and restrained myself.

After two years work the geologists, standing there in their white coats deep in the bowels of the island, told us they had come up with zilch. Nothing at all. The lead geologist was no longer there, It seems he had taken a fall from a high place and landed on his head, killing him.

Which brings me to why we were there. Nomikos was running out of options. His last hope was that there might be a near-shore or off-shore mineral resource of commercial value. Our job was to collect rock samples in a grid pattern in the shallower waters around the island, nothing deeper than 250 feet.

250 feet! All we had was air, not mixed gasses! I ended up being convinced we could do it. There would only be a few bounce dives inside the caldera to that depth. We would follow a shot-line straight to the bottom, fill a basket at the end of the line with everything we could grab in five minutes, then come up with decompression stops.

Nomikos loaned us Drakon 1 for a dive boat and had shipped Throckmorton’s recompression chamber from mothball storage in Piraeus. We secured the chamber to the after deck of the Drakon. I was not reassured when we ran recompression drills. The main hatch’s O-ring was cut through and nothing we tried to join the two ends held under pressure. And one of the high-pressure hoses kept blowing off its fittings. We had no spares for either. So of course, we started the expedition with the deep dives!

If I have any criticism of Throckmorton after all these years it would be that he shouldn’t have begun the survey until these problems were fixed. But we never needed the chamber. We completed the deep dives without incident, other than the uncomfortably hot water at the bottom of the caldera and the constant bashing of heads against floating boulders of tuff on the surface, so the issue was forgotten. Except by me. Probably why Bass was so annoyed with me three years later when we were in Bodrum gearing up for Yassi Ada when, after painting the recompression chamber inside and out, I kept insisting I could smell paint vapors inside. I have exceptional vision, hearing, and smell, and I sure wasn’t going to let anyone get pressurized in a chamber with enamel paint fumes without putting up a fight. The difference is that Bass listened, in spite of the inconvenience. We put fans and a dehumidifier inside the chamber and ran them until even I couldn’t smell anything, long after everyone else swore they couldn’t detect any more fumes. Safety always came first with George Bass.

We spent a week collecting samples from our grid and the lab was busy processing them, and when we were done and started reconfiguring for our archaeological survey, we heard from Nomikos that our efforts hadn’t produced any fruit – no new discoveries from the samples. He wanted us to try one more thing, then we were free to devote ourselves to archaeology. There was a submerged volcano about thirty miles to the north, the Colombo Sea Mount, and he wanted us to collect samples from the ejecta surrounding the mount.

The wind was up and the sea was rough when we set out the next morning, and without a water bladder in tow, the Drakon was an uncomfortable ride, wallowing around like a cork adrift. Everyone on board, crew and divers alike, were seasick by the time we reached the mount. I was part of the first team down, and my partner was Ian Smyth, an RAF pilot and experienced diver. We were vomiting over the rail even as we assembled our gear and suited up. Both of knew we’d settle down once we were below the surface in still water.

Our normal protocol was to check our own gear and then to check our partner’s. The deck was heaving and we agreed to skip the second part. We ran a staggered dive plan. Ian want down first. He would check the set of the anchor, then get the lay of the land. I would join him five minutes later and we would begin collecting samples. He would be relieved by the first diver of the next team five minutes before I would be relieved. This overlap gave a member of each team a few minutes topside to talk and pass on information about the work.

So I waited five minutes and went over the side. Once I was about twenty feet down I started feeling better. The water was crystal clear and I could see the volcano. It looked like a child’s drawing of a volcano, a perfect cone with steep sides, like an ice cream sugar cone turned upside down, its sides disappearing into the depths. The top of the cone was flattened, a plateau ninety feet beneath the surface and about sixty feet across, with the Drakon’s anchor resting pretty much dead center. The only thing I didn’t see was Ian.

I followed the anchor line and touched down on the plateau, searching in every direction. Finally, I saw a stream of bubbles coming up from the south side of the plateau and swam over, noticing as I did a current going my direction getting stronger. It had become very strong by the time I reached the edge and I had to hold on to a boulder to keep from being swept away as I peered over the rim. Ian was about thirty feet below me, climbing hand-over hand up the side of the cone and struggling against the current. And then his bubbles stopped. I let go and the current dragged me down to his level and I managed to stick my hand into a hole and stop my descent. Ian took my regulator for a breath of air and we climbed the rest of the way to the plateau together, sharing the air in my tank, until we were free of the current and able to swim to the anchor line and return to the surface.

Back on the boat Ian said he had run out of air about five minutes into the dive, just, I suppose, as I was going over the side. Ian wore a Bouee Fenzy buoyancy vest, a new invention in 1971, and it carried a small air bottle of its own to adjust a diver’s buoyancy, or to completely inflate the vest or, and this is how Ian had used it, as a very short duration emergency diver’s air supply. He had just exhausted the air in the tiny bottle when I found him.

We went over his gear again, and discovered he had no O-ring in his tank-to-regulator connection. His air had simply purged itself and he had been too seasick to notice. That’s what can happen when you’re seasick. That’s what can happen when you break safety protocol. I should have checked his gear too. I was as much to blame as he was.

The buoyancy compensating vest, or BC, was a new gadget back then. I usually stayed away from new gadgets, thinking them just one more thing to go wrong, because out on the water, the things man makes always break, and I wanted to be dependent on as few high-tech pieces of gear as possible. But Ian’s experience that day made me a convert, and I’ve never dived without one since.

The seas calmed down and we resumed our dives. Ian and I made a second dive around noon and we were learning many interesting things about the Colombo sea mount. It was riddled with lava tubes that had both weak and strong currents flowing into and out of them. Ian and I had been caught up in one of the strong currents flowing down from the rim and into a tube that could have swallowed us forever.

The other amazing thing about the volcano was that just about every large lava tube had a giant grouper living at its mouth. By giant, I mean five hundred to seven hundred pounds of fish! It’s extremely rare to see even a solitary grouper this size, and it was amazing to see dozens of them at a time.

A very interesting place, but, as it turned out, devoid of any commercial mineral value. Sorry Petros. The economy of the island of Santorini today is entirely dependent on its tourist trade. The demand for water has grown all over the Mediterranean and Paros is no longer able to spare the water Santorini needs, so Nomikos built a desalination plant out of necessity. Very expensive water. But still enough for the grapes, and the island has been experiencing a resurgence in its wine production. The wines of Santorini are well worth trying.

We got to work on our archaeological survey, digging a grid of holes through one to two meters of ash off the Akrotiri coast. We found evidence the ancient city extended at least half a kilometer farther out from the existing shoreline. One surprise was the discovery of the foot of a Minoan altar base resting on the bottom near the limit of the city’s extent offshore. It was little more than a heavily encrusted piece of marble, roughly bell shaped, about forty centimeters high and thirty centimeters wide. Easily identifiable by comparison to similar artifacts on Crete, and nothing too special or valuable. Our permit required us to turn over all artifacts to the local police station the same day we recovered them.

But there was a problem. The local police station was closed by the time we quit for the day and tied up in port. Throckmorton decided to store the artifact in one of our rooms and then to take it straight to the police station when they opened in the morning. Not such a good idea. “Someone”, and there are eyes everywhere, someone saw us carrying “something” from the boat to our house. As luck would have it, Throckmorton had stashed the altar base in my room, and I was shocked awake in the middle of the night by the police barging through the door, flashlights in my face, handcuff on my wrists, and it was off to jail.

It took until noon the next day and the intervention of Nomikos to get me out. No apologies were offered but no one was angry with me; I was just a pawn in the game. Marinatos had used the opportunity to make the point that no foreigner, not even as famous as Throckmorton or Edgerton, was immune from the power of Marinatos and the military dictatorship.

It was a small thing. No real harm done. We got back to work and finished what we had come to do. On the day of our departure we waited in a café at the top of the cliff in Fira for the arrival of the Iraklion, the Nomikos-line ferry that would take us back to Piraeus, and when it was time, I settled in for the donkey ride down the trail to the bottom, looking forward to getting home. It wasn’t until an hour after we had sailed that I realized I had left my large-format camera, a Rollei SL-66, sitting on a table in the café.

I know, I know – it sounds crazy. But I had a lot of gear and, well, I messed up. I had to wait out the two-day trip hack to Piraeus, the four hours to refuel and take on new passengers and cargo, then the two day return trip before I could start the search for my prized camera.

I ran up the trail from the harbor. 850 feet up the face of the cliff. I was breathless when I stumbled into the café and wasn’t quite sure I was seeing things right. There, on the same table, four days after I had left them, were my camera and even my coffee cup, untouched.

No one messes with Nomikos or Marinatos. If I had suffered the backside of the hand of power with a night in jail, here was the power of both respect and fear working in my favor for a change. No moral here, just an observation.