7th September - Visit to Akrotiri archaeological site

 We walked in to Fira today along the Fira to Oia walk. We were a little late as the Odyssey of the Seas and MV Gemini were in port today and had already started to disgorge passengers. Many of the tenders were dropping passengers at the old port that has a stairway and cable car up to Fira. 

Odyssey of the seas arriving in Santorini at 7am

Cable car getting a workout.

We walked to the bus station and found we had just missed the 8:30am bus so walked to the rim overlooking the ships and called Bernie for her birthday. 

View of ships where we stopped to call Bernie
We wandered around a bit then made our way back to the bus station for the 10am bus to Akrotiri and Red beach. It was a 30 minute trip to the site. To our surprise it wasn’t that busy. one tour group went through while we were there but they wizzed through and left us to enjoy the site at our own pace. 


Model of the excavations

Two and three storey buildings

Large vases found in the excavation

Beds that were outside the houses. 

This is an amazing archaeological site. The first evidence of habitation is from the “4th millennium BC (Neolithic) to 16th century BC (Bronze Age)”. There is evidence of many earthquakes and rebuilding and the last earthquake happened just before the eruption of the volcano that buried the site and caused the current caldera that we see at Santorini today. 

I couldn’t believe how advanced this civilisation was. We saw a house that had an indoor toilet linked to the city sewerage system! This is at the same time as other bronze age civilisations lived in caves or stick huts! The beds outside the houses were evidence of recovery operations that happened after the earthquake before the city was abandoned due to the eruption.

After we finished wandering through the site we headed down to red beach to have a look at the red backdrop and sand. We had lunch at a little snack stand to have our first Gyros of the trip. David was able to eat the whole thing and I just ate the insides. It was very nice.


We then walked back to the bus stop to catch the bus back to Fira. We passed many vineyards with their very different vines. We didn’t have time to go the winery so stopped in at a shop in Fira to purchase a bottle of local red.
Grape vines that are plaited into circles due to harsh conditions
We walked back to our accomodation in the heat of the afternoon passing the amazing scenery that we couldn’t stop taking pictures of.

The wine is delicious, full bodied red that we enjoyed a glass of when we got back to the apartment.

We went for another swim to cool off in the pool and sat for a while to relax with our feet in the water. When others came we decided to head back up our room to enjoy the sunset on our balcony.

View from the pool into the caldera 



Our last sunset in Santorini.







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