Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City

by Mark Adams

  I finally determined that George held some sort of elected office in town, something like a city council member, but I never did find out specifics. Nor could I suss out his opinions on Santorini’s relation to Plato’s Atlantis other than a general feeling that it was good for tourism. (His English was pretty solid but his linguistic strengths pertained to the hospitality business; my Greek consisted entirely of “Kalimera!”) Every few minutes, the chirping pop song of George’s ringtone emanated from his pocket. He’d check who was calling and slip the phone back into his jeans.

  The strike had shut down Santorini’s many museums as well, so we didn’t have much to do except drive around the island, which seemed to please George immensely. Santorini isn’t particularly large, and George wanted to make sure I saw every inch of its tephra, the thick white layer of volcanic boulders, ash, and cinders that covers its surface like frosting on a cake. We drove through George’s village from every conceivable direction—“There’s my grandmother’s house; there’s the store where I used to buy candy; there’s my cousin; Kalimera! Kalimera!”—and saw some of the island’s best-known sights. We visited the famous red sand beach and the equally famous black sand beach; we drove up to the mountaintop monastery; we gazed down at an open-air pumice mine that had provided raw material for the cement that built the Suez Canal; we passed through picturesque tomato fields and vineyards, beneficiaries of the island’s rich volcanic soil. We drove through, over, and around a lot of tephra. We made our way north toward Oia, a whitewashed town perched atop the cliffs at the northern tip of Santorini’s crescent and by general consensus the prettiest spot on an island renowned for its beauty. We visited a few more stores featuring George’s various wares, including the Atlantis bookshop, passing along the way several brides in white gowns posing for photographs. I asked George why they all seemed to be Asian. “Santorini is very popular with the Chinese,” he said. “They come all this way for weddings and they don’t even drink!” He pounded the steering wheel to underscore this lunacy.

  We descended the steep, curving two-lane road to Oia’s harbor, where George had arranged for his pal Dimitris to take us out on his speedboat. Over the years I’ve noticed that people who live on small islands tend to fall into two categories—those who dream of escaping someday and those who couldn’t possibly imagine living elsewhere. George and Dimitris, like Anton Mifsud on Malta, belonged wholeheartedly to the second group. Dimitris was big and bearded and smiled a lot. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth he looked like a friendly Russian heavyweight gone to seed.

  We circled the caldera clockwise, slapping through choppy surf. Wind stood my hair on end, and salt spray dried and crusted in a film on my glasses. I looked over at George, who was returning some phone calls. Not a hair was out of place. Occasionally, he cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and pointed at something, saying, “Mark, take a picture of that.”

  Dimitris steered the boat toward Nea Kameni, Santorini’s central island. As we approached, he scrunched up his nose. “You can smell now—like a bad egg,” he said. Near the shore, sulfur had tinted the water shamrock green. On the island, tourists were marching around a smoldering crater. Geologically speaking, Nea Kameni is a newborn, having first appeared in 1707 and expanding through occasional lava growth spurts ever since. Though the volcano had been relatively quiet for more than sixty years, restaurateurs had recently noticed their wineglasses clinking together, the result of new tremors. Geologists had in recent months determined that a new “magma balloon,” a name perhaps a shade too jolly for the first sign of an inevitable volcanic apocalypse, was growing beneath Santorini’s caldera.

  Back on shore, George took me to Dimitris’s waterfront restaurant and ordered enough food and wine for eight people. We finished only about two-thirds of it. Oia is famous for its sunsets, and we waited for the sun to start its descent toward the sea, as happy as a Chinese wedding party, if somewhat less sober. My eyelids began to droop. George’s phone trilled. He glanced down, sat up straight, and took off his sunglasses. He had a brief, somewhat formal-sounding discussion in Greek with the other party.

  “Mr. Doumas would like to meet us for dinner,” he said, placing his phone solemnly on the table. “Mark, thank you for making this possible. To meet Mr. Doumas is a great honor for me.”

  • • •

  Between the time George dropped me off and then picked me up for our dinner date with Doumas, I drank a very large coffee and reviewed my notes about Akrotiri. If anything, the archaeological discoveries following the Marinatos dig in the 1960s had only made it a stronger candidate for Atlantis. At the time of its burial, Akrotiri had been a thriving port city whose citizens enjoyed the prosperity of their maritime trading successes. Two- and three-story houses were built on narrow cobbled streets. Remains from storage chambers demonstrated gourmet tastes for foods both domestic and imported. A sophisticated plumbing system carried wastewater away from homes into pipes under the paving stones. Neat piles of debris and evidence of recent structural repair work seemed to indicate that Akrotiri was cleaning up from an earlier seismic shock when the Thera blast occurred. The earthquake-followed-by-catastrophe sequence paralleled the demise of Plato’s Atlantis.

  The most revelatory finds had been the frescoes found adorning the walls of nearly every home. These had been preserved to a remarkable degree by their burial in ash. George had given me a pamphlet written by Doumas in which the scholar described the painting and pottery of the ancient Therans as showing Minoan influence, but displaying a looser, less formal style. One intricately detailed fresco wrapping around three walls of a second-story room could have been a panoramic snapshot taken thirty-six hundred years ago. A fleet of oared ships carrying warriors, escorted by dolphins, sails between two towns. Well-dressed crowds have assembled in both, the smaller one bidding farewell and the larger one, which resembles Akrotiri, greeting the arrivals. It seemed possible that the scene captured a pre-eruption voyage between Crete and Thera.

  • • •

  Around eight that night, George and I drove to the southern end of Santorini, to a quiet restaurant looking out onto the infinite blackness of the Sea of Crete. George arranged for a table on the terrace where we could hear the gentle waves rolling onto the shore. Then we waited. And waited. After about forty-five minutes George nervously called Doumas, who was so absorbed in some work that he had forgotten about dinner. A few minutes later we watched a tiny, bespectacled figure slowly materialize from the direction of the Akrotiri ruins.

  “I must apologize again; I was preparing slides for a presentation tomorrow and I lost track of time,” Doumas said, taking a seat across from George and me. His excellent posture and pouf of white hair gave him the bearing of a wise eagle. He spoke English with the perfectly clipped cadences of a British aristocrat and used words like whilst. Two women approached the table, smiling and leaning in to give him a kiss. “You see, all the ladies love me,” he said, and as further proof a gray-haired matron in a black dress and apron burst out of the kitchen and smothered Doumas with affection. When she departed, Doumas said, “She was the cook at our dig here,” with Marinatos in the 1960s. “She was fourteen years old. Now she has grandchildren.”

  George poured dry Santorini white wine for the three of us, and Doumas warily inquired about my research. As the world’s leading living expert on the world’s number one Atlantis candidate, he was called on frequently to appear in documentaries and such, only to find out later that his words had been twisted or used out of context.9 He was visibly relieved when I told him that I wasn’t necessarily trying to prove that Santorini was Atlantis. I was more interested in trying to find out why so many others had tried to do so.

  “Well, first of all because Santorini’s present shape recalls the shape of rings,” he said. “Akrotiri is the best example of a Bronze Age city in the Aegean that is so well preserved, and it is a revelation because of its high standard of living. This, combined wi
th the shape of the island, makes people imagine things.”

  “But didn’t Marinatos see a correlation between Thera and Atlantis?” I asked.

  “Marinatos said that after the eruption of the volcano, obviously contacts between Crete and Egypt were interrupted. And therefore there was created a legend that an island disappeared and so on. But he says on the other hand, if this was known to the Egyptians, why does no source in Egypt mention it? We know a lot about the ancient world, thanks to the Egyptian sources, but there is nothing like that in the Egyptian literature.”

  Had I been less intimidated and afraid of embarrassing George, who was sitting quietly with his hands folded, like an altar boy listening to a homily, I might have argued that whether or not the disappearance of Thera appears in the Egyptian chronicles was, like most things Atlantean, open to interpretation. I might also have noted that Marinatos had sometimes indulged ambiguity for the sake of drawing attention (and money) to Akrotiri, to the degree that people still argued about whether he’d said Thera was Atlantis or not.

  Doumas saw no point in equivocating. When he started working at Akrotiri in 1968, a friend who owned the island’s only hotel had called to ask if Doumas would adopt a neutral stance on the question of Atlantis in order to attract visitors. “I said I was a scholar, not a tourist agent,” he said. The sour look on his face made clear that forty years later he was still irked by the hotelier’s nerve.

  Doumas has never been exactly shy about voicing his skepticism about Atlantis, either. He’d expressed plenty of doubts into a microphone at the inaugural Atlantis conference in 2005, at which he’d been invited to give the keynote address. He started his remarks by calling Atlantis “science fiction,” a description that must have confused a crowd largely comprised of people hoping to find Plato’s lost land. In the version published in the conference proceedings, he concluded with a quotation in French and an appeal to his fellow scholars to “stop pursuing chimeras.”

  Over dinner, Doumas was no less dubious. “Those who support a view that Santorini was Atlantis say, ‘Well, it was a mistake,’” Doumas said. “Instead of 900 they wrote 9,000. No. Plato was firm; he was clear. It was nine thousand years before. And of course in the tenth millennium such a culture never existed. It is the postglacial period. Plato has also written about the Cave of the Ideas, yes?” Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, one of the most famous passages in the Republic, is where Socrates describes a hypothetical group of prisoners chained underground who experience reality as a set of flickering shadows on a wall. Meanwhile all the colorful, three-dimensional wonders of the sun-filled world transpire a few meters beyond. The scene nicely illustrates one of philosophy’s primary conundrums: the wide gap between the small slice of existence that we’re able to perceive through our senses and any sort of objective truth. “So why don’t we identify the Cave of the Ideas and try to find it?” Doumas asked.

  To Doumas, the story of Atlantis was simply a tale that Plato cooked up to illustrate the political theories in the Republic. “He wanted to present to his fellow Athenians that for a society to be in harmony, in peace, it has to respect certain rules. And as soon as these rules are not followed, then the gods are against you. It’s exactly the same thing like in the myth of Sodom and Gomorrah, in the Bible. It’s no different. So why do people not try to find Sodom and Gomorrah?”

  “Actually,” I said, trying not to sound disrespectful, “I’m pretty sure people are looking for Sodom and Gomorrah at this very moment.”

  “They are; I know,” Doumas said, shaking his head. “People are crazy.”

  While Doumas and I chatted, George continued filling our wineglasses and quietly ordered a massive spread of seafood. Plates of mussels and shrimp and tiny fried fish arrived in waves until the tabletop was so crowded we had to keep our hands in our laps. Doumas nibbled at a few things and apologized for not being able to indulge more enthusiastically. He’d recently suffered a heart attack. He was nearing eighty years old and with the Greek economic crisis the budget for Akrotiri excavations had been cut to zero. I got the sense that his naturally low reserves of bullshit had long since been burned through.

  “If you look at the occupation, or the specialty, of those who are in favor of Atlantis, you will realize that they have nothing to do with classics nor history nor archaeology. Nothing. Somebody’s an engineer, another is a geologist. Well, when Praxiteles made the famous statue of Hermes in Olympia, he called the sandalmaker of Olympia to check if there was anything wrong with the sandals. This sandalmaker came and, admiring, said, ‘I think if the head of the statue was a little bit further left, or if the hair . . .’ So Praxiteles said, ‘Shoemaker to your shoes.’ Don’t get involved in other people’s affairs. I don’t say these people are crooks. I think because they are not specialists in the field, maybe they really believe these things.”

  “So why do you think people still get so excited about finding it?” I asked. I was a little drunk at this point—maybe more than a little—and Doumas had just dismissed about a year’s worth of research I had done. I suddenly felt emotionally committed to the search for Atlantis. I was looking for an honest answer.

  “If you remember, the title of my paper at the 2005 conference was ‘The Utopia of a Utopia.’ Atlantis is a utopia. Everyone would like to live in such an ideal city. It’s a dream.”

  • • •

  I didn’t do much dreaming when I crawled into bed after midnight. Around 6:00 A.M. I woke up unrested, still unsettled by my talk with Doumas, and severely hungover. My mouth felt as if it had been stuffed with volcanic ash, and the words of the physician Eryximachus from Plato’s Symposium swished around my throbbing brain: “If I have learned anything from medicine, it is the following point: Inebriation is harmful to everyone.”

  I cursed George’s gift for hospitality, pulled on some clothes, and went out in search of coffee. The only place open was a small, open-air restaurant catering to the fishermen who sold their daily catch at a small stand across the street. Seafood was perhaps second on the list of things I didn’t want to think about, behind dry Santorini white wine. After two double espressos, I decided to sweat out the prior day’s overindulgence by walking down the 586 steps from Fira, on the rim of Santorini’s bowl, to the water.

  The zigzagging trip to the bottom was peaceful and pretty enough that I wished I’d brought my camera. Out ahead of me, Nea Kameni smoldered in the center of the caldera. Doumas’s doubts had made me more skeptical than ever that any temple of Poseidon had ever occupied the same space. The return trip to the top was far trickier. Every two minutes a small team of mules came charging down the steps like the bulls at Pamplona, shitting everywhere, followed by a mule tender with no sympathy for anyone who lacked the good sense to pay him for a ride to the top. I finally reached the summit, soaked with sweat, smelling of yesterday’s wine from the waist up and barnyard from the ankles down. George called, sounding less than fresh himself. He suggested we push our scheduled visit to Akrotiri back a couple of hours. “No strike today, Mark,” he croaked. “Meet me at my café at eleven.”

  By noon, George was wheedling complimentary passes from the ticket sellers at Akrotiri. (I recognized the universal hand gestures signifying “This guy is a travel writer; can’t we come in for free?”) Visitors have to enter a modern building, covered by a new steel-beamed roof, in order to see the ancient buildings dug out of the earth. (The site had only recently reopened after a seven-year hiatus because part of the old roof had collapsed and killed a tourist.) Even on a hot sunny day the ruins felt spooky, recently deserted. They looked like abandoned sand castles. Walking down the excavated streets made me feel creepy, like I was visiting a crime scene. No human remains had yet been found. Doumas believed that future excavations might find large numbers of bodies once the area near the former port was cleared. His hypothesis was that the people of Thera had been waiting to escape on ships when the island blew sky-high.

>   We circled the ruins for an hour, George snapping plenty of high-resolution photos for future projects. The frescoes had all been removed and shipped off to the national museum in Athens. There were no Atlantis revelations to be found here.

  “Mark, you look like you could use a glass of wine,” George said, patting me on the shoulder. Ten minutes later we were seated on the terrace of a winery of which George was, I wasn’t shocked to learn, part owner. After two glasses of dry white, our hangovers lifted. In a pleasant haze, I met some more of George’s cousins. We ate a huge lunch at Character Café, polished off a bottle of Santorini rosé, and watched the sun sink over the caldera, the most gorgeous sunset I’d ever seen. But just thinking of the blast that had formed a thousand-foot-deep hole gave me chills.

  In the Odyssey, Homer writes of the importance of xenia, or “guest-friendship,” the ancient Greek tradition of offering hospitality to strangers who are far from home. I thanked George for showing me xenia, but he said he didn’t recognize the word and changed the subject to restaurants that I should check out in Athens, where I was heading next. Perhaps I was butchering the pronunciation. Early the next morning, when I checked out of the hotel, the owner handed me my bill, along with two shopping bags stuffed with postcards, calendars, books, dried fava beans, olive oil, and wine.

  “Kalimera!” he said. “George left these for you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Triangulating Pythagoras