Santorini caldera
Drowned volcanic crater ringed by cliff-top towns, formed when a Bronze Age eruption emptied the island's core into the sea.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Santorini caldera follows the Bronze Age town of Akrotiri in the weeks before a colossal eruption around 1600 BCE, when tremors sent its people packing away their gold and silver rather than waiting it out. It traces what the eruption did to the island itself, the wave it sent toward Crete, and the theories linking the buried town to Plato's account of a vanished civilization. Archaeologists have spent decades digging without finding a single skeleton, and the guide sits with that open question rather than closing it.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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