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

by Mark Adams

  When I raised this issue with Tony O’Connell, he insisted that I take a look at the work of Thorwald Franke, an independent Atlantis researcher in Germany. Franke was diligent about his philological research, to the extent that he had self-published a nifty bit of textual detective work, Aristotle and Atlantis, that examined the sources of Aristotle’s supposed doubt. (Franke believes Sicily was the original inspiration for Atlantis but didn’t mention this in the Aristotle book.) Franke argues convincingly that the Aristotle quote can be traced to a conflation of two similar-sounding passages in one of the key works of ancient geography, Strabo’s Geographica, published early in the first century AD. Over the years a misinterpretation hardened into fact.

  What I found even more interesting in Franke’s book was his argument that not only hadn’t Aristotle objected to the idea of Atlantis, but also in many of his works he seems to confirm some belief in its veracity. In his Meteorology, he describes the shallow sea outside the Pillars of Heracles as clogged by mud, and Franke notes that “in the context of a geophysical work that deals with matters such as earthquakes and floods, one might have expected from Aristotle an explanation for this phenomenon.” Since there is none, Franke writes, it is reasonable to assume this mud west of Gibraltar was common knowledge. Aristotle supports Plato’s description of the Deucalion flood as a regional, catastrophic event, and—crucially—affirms his teacher’s ideas that knowledge is discovered and lost repeatedly in cycles and that “mythical traditions are remnants of knowledge from before the last cultural demise,” Franke writes. Franke concludes that while none of this proves the existence of Plato’s Atlantis, we can deduce from Aristotle’s “eloquent silence” that at the very least the second-greatest Western philosopher didn’t consider the lost island an outright fabrication.

  Modern Athens seemed to be going through its own cycle of catastrophes. A few days before my arrival, Syntagma Square, which I belatedly realized on the train from the airport was about a Molotov cocktail’s throw from my hotel, had been packed with fifty thousand angry protesters, many chucking rocks at the police, who responded with tear gas. They had come to show their displeasure with the German chancellor, who was in town to squeeze further cuts from the Greek budget. What I found in Syntagma when I emerged from the subway after dark was something less dramatic but sadder—a large park across the street from Greece’s parliament populated by homeless people sleeping on the ground. Stray dogs sniffed around for edible scraps and didn’t seem to be finding much.

  In the morning, I stepped over the sidewalk campers outside my hotel and walked a couple of miles, crossing under a highway and over a set of train tracks, to the original site of Plato’s Academy. As a scenic monument to one of the most important pieces of real estate in intellectual history, it falls a little short of the Platonic ideal. The sign warning away nongeometers has long since disappeared, along with just about everything else. In Plato’s time the spot had been a peaceful grove with shrines, a gymnasium, and areas dedicated to lectures and debate. Today, it consists of a few stone foundations that have been excavated inside of a public park in a somewhat shabby neighborhood northwest of the Acropolis. Plato died at a wedding feast in 347 BC, and his body had been buried on the grounds of the Academy, according to Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Which means that theoretically his grave is within the confines of the park, but like so much about Plato, the location of his final resting spot remains a mystery.

  The day was hot and the park was nearly deserted. In Plato’s time, scholars throughout the Mediterranean gathered at the Academy for communal meals and ontological discourse. The only group I saw was unwashed men huddled atop the stone remains of an ancient foundation, hiding from the noon sun and drinking large cans of Alfa beer. Their possessions were stuffed into plastic shopping bags that had been stowed between gaps in the ruins. Several stones had been tagged with graffiti. My search for an ancient olive tree under which Plato was said to have led discussions with students was no more successful than my hunt for his tomb. Later I read that someone had pulled down the tree to use for firewood.

  I walked back toward the city center and an outdoor souvlaki joint that George Nomikos had recommended, ordered a large Alfa of my own, and pulled out my copy of The Atlantis Hypothesis: Searching for a Lost Land, the collected papers delivered at the first International Conference on the Atlantis Hypothesis in 2005. This compendium is, to put it mildly, eclectic. It opens with Christos Doumas’s essay dismissing Atlantis as a chimera and closes with one by Stavros Papamarinopoulos, the organizer of the conference, making an entirely cogent and convincing argument for its reality. Scattered in between are articles on everything from Freudian interpretations of the Atlantis myth to the effects of sea-level change on coastal geography following the last Ice Age. The essay I was searching for, however, was about another of the great lost cities of ancient Greece, Helike, and its possible influence on Plato.

  The accepted history of Helike’s sudden end is strikingly similar to the story of Atlantis. During the winter of 373 BC, this prosperous capital of the city-state of Achaea, situated on a coastal plain near the Gulf of Corinth, disappeared in a single night. For five days prior to the event, the historian Aelian wrote, inhabitants of the city had noticed that “all the mice and martens and snakes and centipedes and beetles and every other creature of that kind left in a body” and fled for higher ground. A huge earthquake struck Helike during the night, destroying houses and killing most of its residents. When day broke, the stunned survivors attempted to flee but were drowned by a massive wave that overwhelmed Helike and erased almost any evidence that a city had existed. The Greek geographer Strabo wrote that the “whole district together with the city was hidden from sight; and two thousand men who were sent by the Achaeans were unable to recover the dead bodies.” In the city’s sacred grove devoted to Poseidon, only the tops of the trees were still visible. Ten Spartan ships at anchor nearby were also destroyed.

  Like Atlantis, Helike had a strong connection to Poseidon. When the Greek geographer Eratosthenes visited the site about 150 years after the catastrophe, he spoke with ferrymen who described a bronze statue of Poseidon that remained standing, visible just beneath the water’s surface in a poros, an archaic Greek word that’s usually translated as a narrow passage of water. In its hand the statue held aloft a small sea horse that threatened to snag fishermen’s nets. The second-century-AD Greek geographer Pausanias wrote that the destruction of Helike had been the work of a vengeful Poseidon, a punishment by the god of earthquakes against the people of Helike for refusing to give a statue of himself to a group of supplicants who had voyaged from Asia Minor.

  Despite the abundance of historical accounts, physical evidence of Helike is scarce. Spyridon Marinatos spent more than twenty years searching for the lost city; just months before his breakthrough at Akrotiri, he had predicted to a reporter that Helike, which because of its sudden disappearance might contain unimaginable bronze and marble sculptures from the classical era, would be “almost surely the most spectacular archaeological discovery ever made.” Even after Akrotiri became world famous in 1967, Marinatos continued to pursue Helike until his death seven years later.

  At the moment Helike vanished in 373 BC, Plato would have been in Athens, less than a hundred miles away, teaching at the Academy. He had likely written the Republic by this time and may have been pondering how to expand on some of its ideas in what would become the Timaeus. News of an important Greek city with ties to Poseidon being almost instantaneously demolished by an earthquake and resulting sea surge would surely have reached him. If the Atlantis tale was indeed the first example of historical fiction, as some have proposed, then the disappearance of Helike would have been obvious source material. The eminent Plato scholar A. E. Taylor wrote of Atlantis that “the account of its destruction is manifestly based on the facts of the great earthquake and tidal wave of the year 373 which ravaged the Achaean coast.”


  Employing the standard interpretation of poros as a narrow passage of water, Marinatos sought the lost city on the seabed of the Gulf of Corinth. Others, including Jacques Cousteau, turned up to try their luck. (Cousteau actually came twice, to no avail.) It was only when a young classics scholar paused to question the meaning of poros that a breakthrough was made.

  That scholar, Dora Katsonopoulou, invited me to meet her at the new Acropolis Museum in Athens. It occurred to me as I waited outside for her to arrive, looking up at the hilltop ruins, that when Plato wrote the Critias these temples were younger than the Empire State Building is today. Katsonopoulou, now in her fifties, was easy to spot from fifty yards away—effortlessly glamorous, with long dark hair and a red scarf.

  We took the escalator to the museum’s third-floor café, where a wall of windows provided a breathtaking panoramic view of the Acropolis, the afternoon sun illuminating the geometric perfection of the ruined Parthenon. Heads at other tables turned in our direction, trying to figure out if Katsonopoulou was someone important, which she certainly was to anyone interested in Atlantis. We ordered coffees and split a piece of apple pie. By this time I’d met enough Atlantologists for coffee that my Pavlovian response to the scent of roasted beans was to start asking questions about concentric circles, but Katsonopoulou preempted me by explaining how she had gotten involved in hunting for lost cities.

  “I was a graduate student getting a PhD in classics at Cornell University, back in ’85 or ’86,” she said. One day her adviser phoned and said someone from the astrophysics department was interested in Helike and wanted to speak with her. Steven Soter was a well-known scientist who, among other achievements, had cowritten Carl Sagan’s Cosmos documentary series. While helping a colleague research ancient literature about the possible causes of earthquakes, he had become fascinated by Helike. Katsonopoulou knew the story well—she had studied ancient Greek and had grown up on the Peloponnesus near the rumored site of Helike. She had heard tales of its disappearance as a child. Soter and Katsonopoulou organized the Helike Project to conduct an archaeological search for the lost city. In 1988, following the strategy employed by their predecessors, they conducted a thorough sonar survey of the muddy waters of the Gulf of Corinth. They found nothing.

  After this failure, Katsonopoulou went back and reviewed Eratosthenes’s account of his visit, focusing on the detail of the statue sunk in the poros. She realized that the ferrymen whom Eratosthenes had interviewed were not transporting people across the larger gulf, but rather across “a sort of lake or lagoon that was connected to the sea,” she told me. Today, the spot occupied by this poros is dry land, covered with a thick layer of sediment. “So I said we should look on land, not in the sea,” she said, pointing her fork at me. “And I was right!”

  In 2000, having moved their search inland, the Helike Project team dug four trial trenches and began finding evidence ten to twenty feet beneath the ground—ceramics, masonry stones, and a bronze coin from the fifth century BC. Predictably, the BBC marked these discoveries by airing a documentary titled Helike: The Real Atlantis.

  A waiter brought another slice of pie to the table, unsolicited. Katsanopoulou arched an eyebrow and waved him away. I asked how the just-completed archaeological season at Helike had gone. “Amazing! Very exciting! In one trench we found a very impressive destruction layer, as we call it in archaeology. It means you don’t have the remains of walls or buildings, but you have . . . like someone just hurled everything! I suspect that this is the layer of the 373 earthquake.”

  Such a violent dispersal would require extremely powerful seismic activity. Sedimentological analysis, still pending, could prove a tsunami had followed. Naturally, I steered the topic toward Atlantis. How closely were the two related?

  “I think for Plato, Helike is the model of the destructive phenomenon,” Katsonopoulou said. “The same things are described, the sea and the tsunami and how the city disappeared from the face of the earth. Exactly what our sources say about Helike. Poseidon was the patron god of Helike and the patron god of Atlantis and also the god of earthquakes and underground waters. Poseidon destroyed Helike, and he probably destroyed Atlantis—in both cases for being impious. In Critias, Plato’s text stops abruptly at the end. I believe that the continuation would have been for Zeus to ask Poseidon to come in and punish Atlantis.”

  Another waiter came bearing apple pie. Katsanopoulou threw her hands up and said something sharp to him in Greek. He scurried away. She shook her head, took a sip of coffee, and continued.

  “Another amazing thing is that Plato was alive at the time of Helike and lived very close, in Athens. One of the ancients tells us that the Spartan admiral who tried to take Plato into slavery in Syracuse—to sell him, in fact—this Spartan admiral was in Helike the night of the catastrophe and drowned there. That makes it even more plausible that Plato knew about this event and that it could serve as a model.”

  There was an even more direct personal link from Helike to Plato. One of the primary sources about the city’s destruction had been a student of his at the Academy, Heraclides. The whole Atlantis story might have been cooked up at a faculty-student mixer just a mile or so from where we were sitting.

  “Would you be shocked if they found a real Atlantis?” I asked.

  “Yes, I would, to tell you the truth. Because so far from the evidence known to us I don’t find any good grounds to support the idea that it did exist. I find it quite plausible that Plato had reasons, including political reasons, to create such a story that involves the Athenians.” She stirred her coffee and tilted her head slightly to the side. “On the other hand, we cannot absolutely exclude the possibility.” Katsonopoulou adjusted her scarf and waited a few seconds to see if I found this diplomatic answer satisfactory. “You’re asking if I think it existed?”

  “Yes.”

  “I cannot say yes. I would be quite, um, cautious.” She seemed to be not quite satisfied with this response.

  “Skeptical?” I suggested.

  “Yes! Skeptical.”

  Katsonopoulou’s theory certainly made sense, if one was looking to explain the disappearance of a sophisticated city connected to Poseidon. It definitely accounted for what Marinatos had called the “one fundamental fact” of Plato’s story, that “a piece of land becomes submerged.” A story based on Helike worked perfectly with Doumas’s idea that the whole point was to illustrate the political ideas in the Republic. Looking out at the world’s most famous ruins, though, I couldn’t help but think of Alexander MacGillivray’s description of a flood that had reached the foot of the Acropolis. When it came to trashing cities with natural disasters, Poseidon had a long rap sheet.

  Just one floor down from the café is a reconstruction of the sculpture that once decorated the west pediment of the Parthenon. At the center of the triangular scene are the figures of Poseidon and Athena, who according to myth had long ago competed to be the patron of Attica, the city-state of which Athens was capital. Poseidon struck his trident into the rock of the Acropolis and created a saltwater spring. Athena planted the first olive tree. Athena was chosen as victor and patron, and the city was named in her honor. The furious Poseidon retaliated by sending a massive wave to flood all of Attica.

  Tony O’Connell had noted a serious problem with the theory that Plato’s story was simply a political fable dipped in historical detail, intended to illustrate the ideas of the Republic: The good guys, the Athenians, suffer the same watery punishment as the bad guys, the Atlanteans. Virtue, rather than being rewarded, drowns right alongside evil. If there was a kernel of truth hiding behind all the myths—and I was almost certain there was, maybe even a big one—it might help unscramble the message Plato had been trying to send. And I was pretty sure I knew the one person on Earth who could help me locate it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Well, That Explains Everything

  Patras, Greece

 
; As I was talking on my cell phone in the café of the Patras bus station, the world’s most respected Atlantologist slipped in quietly and took a seat at the table across from mine. He looked about sixty, wore sunglasses and a navy polo shirt, and scrolled through his text messages as if he had nothing more on his mind than catching the eleven thirty local to Thessaloniki. He made no attempt to catch my attention, and if I hadn’t Googled a photo of him the night before I probably wouldn’t have noticed him, let alone known who he was.

  Stavros Papamarinopoulos could’ve been a character in a John le Carré novel. He held a government job that gave him access to arcane knowledge understandable only to a select group. He spent long stretches of time in Paris. He had arranged for us to meet in the unfashionable port city of Patras, which required me to ride a bus for four hours in each direction from Athens; I later learned that he kept an apartment in Athens. He had replied to perhaps half of the many e-mails I had sent him, and then only briefly and enigmatically. He hadn’t responded at all to the text messages I’d sent this morning informing him of my arrival time. He believed that 70 percent of Plato’s tale had been proven, a number that seemed preposterous until I read his essays. He had organized three international conferences on the subject of Atlantis and edited three thick volumes of papers, yet was perhaps the world’s only Atlantis expert who had never appeared in a BBC documentary.

  “Stavros?” I finally asked.

  “Yes, Mark,” he said, pocketing his phone. “It’s good to meet you.” He stood and motioned toward the door. “Let’s get a taxi. The students are on strike at my university today. It’s stupid because they will have to do makeup work on Saturday. But today I’m locked out of my office. I have arranged a place for us to talk. We have much to discuss.”