Echoes of Atlantis

Thera. How long has that island held me in its spell? I remember stumbling across its legend as a child. Back in the days before the Trojan war, before Greece was Greek, a thriving people we call Minoans lived on the big island of Crete. They plied the seas with ships, visiting many shores. They traded with Egypt and Babylon and the Bronze Age peoples living where Greece would one day arise from its marble-bedded hills. Minoan art abounded with flowers, colorfully-dressed courtiers, leaping bulls and dolphins, royal gryphons, and the double-bladed axe that was their chief symbol.

Santorini, ancient Thera, was a smaller island north of Crete where the Minoans had settled, mixed with other islanders and seafarers, and built a cozy city that seemed to blend the best of many of the oldest civilizations in the world. Their furniture was ornate, their pottery beautiful, and the rooms of their homes were painted with charming vignettes of fishing and sailing and boxing and flower-picking, or the natural world they seemed to love. They were a prosperous and flourishing people.

Then, sometime in the 15th century BCE, the island awoke, like Vesuvius looming over Pompeii. Stairs cracked and walls fell. The people struggled to stay, but their rich fertile soil was a volcano’s gift— or rather, a loan only. When the caldera gave way, seawater rushed in and met with molten rock and exloded, blowing out the entire middle of the island and leaving only a ragged circle of land which had formerly been shore. It was much like Krakatoa, that awesome cataclysm that robbed the world of one summer in 1883, save for one thing— Thera’s magma chamber was four times larger. Or at least that was the tale told in Atlantis: the Biography of a Legend, an early book on the discovery and excavation of Thera's ruined city. More recent scientific studies have downgraded the severity of the disaster somewhat, but as a child I was gripped by the tale's power. I had written tales and poems of the city that fell into the sea. For surely, garbled and mangled as it was, this was in part the root of the legend Plato retold a thousand years later.

When you receive a summons like this, you had better answer. It's like the poet's Muse.