Santorini: October 10–12, 2024

We hadn’t really intended to visit Santorini. It is a super-popular destination for tourists, and that wasn’t what we were after on this trip.

But the ferry routes conspired to send us there. Though in summer it’s easy to get a ferry straight from Rhodes to Crete, by mid-October the options are more limited. The day that we left Rhodes, no ferries sailed directly to Crete. (If I’d checked the schedules for the next day, I would have found one, and we would have taken it, but then we’d never have gone to Santorini!)

Sailing from Rhodes on October 9, we had to go to Piraeus. And sailing from Piraeus to Crete on October 10, we had to stop in Santorini. And if we were stopping in Santorini, we figured we might as well get off and see what all the fuss was about. It would be late enough in the season that we’d be able to move around; we wouldn’t lose our minds from crowds.

And it would be good to see the place. Santorini used to be the volcanic island Thira (Θήρα), which famously erupted around 3,600 years ago. This event is sometimes suggested as the origin of the myth of Atlantis, the island nation that sank into the sea. Santorini’s distinctive crescent shape is entirely the result of it having once exploded spectacularly (and many times before and after, albeit less spectacularly). The geography alone had to be interesting.

So to Santorini we went!