For the culture part of this leg we took in a tour of the south part of the island. This included Akrotiri, the ancient buried city that was said to have been lived in 4000 years ago, before the great volcanic eruption.
The old city has been covered by a massive building to protect it. They had to stop excavating about 8 years ago due to a lack of funds, but they have only uncovered about 3% of the city thus far. They say that it spans out over 4 square kms. The buildings that they had uncovered already were 3 stories high and had about 10 rooms per floor. These people really lived in luxury!
Our guide, Katarina was from Crete, but had been working on Santorini for 25 years as a guide. She was super knowledgable and hysterically funny. Not everyone on our tour got the jokes and looked a little confused most of the time.
They found wall paintings when they dug down and somehow took them down in one piece and moved them to a museum in Fira. Some of them were metres high - amazing!
Here are a couple of the paintings.
We loved the little guide - she was so funny!
After the city we had to go down to the car park and wait for the bus..... this was the only piece of shade available.
But we did get to watch this man teeter in and out of the water on the rocks, so all was not lost!
The next stop on the tour was to the Black Beach, so called because of the black sand... and let me tell you - she holds in her heat! We stayed here for a couple of hours, so we got ourselves a brolly and some sunbeds and swam in the crystal water. Once you get off the black sand, it's all pebbles under the water. Crazy, but it's true!
This little lady in the picture brought us cocktails.
Katarina took us to a couple of little villages along the way. It's amazing to think that people actually live in them. There is nothing really around except other funny little houses, one or two restaurants, one shop and of course, 27 churches!
As we were walking through the little village, Katarina led us down a tiny street to see what the town looked like after the volcano eruption. There is only one main street in the village, but the next street over is totally derelict and has never been restored.
The last stop on our tour was to a winery. We tasted three wines and were given a hard, volcanic rock type bread biscuit to apparently cleanse the palate! It certainly ripped out the lining of your gums - so I guess that is a sort of cleansing.
This was the view from the balcony at the Santo Winery.
Check out how the grapes grow here and it's the same in Turkey. They are hardy little buggers, crawling on the ground like weeds. They train the plant to grow in a circular shape at the bottom making the branches and roots into a basket shape under the plant, which is where all the grapes collect into - Ingenious!
This was our final sunset in Santorini.
We popped ourselves into a cliff top bar and had ourselves a lovely cocktail to celebrate the occasion.
All around us were loved up couples kissing and gazing at each other.
Not awkward at all.
I found Santorini to be absolutely beautiful in parts and completely desolate and derelict in others. There's a lot of buildings that look like this ⬇ all over the island. There are not many trees, just low scrub and lots of rubbish everywhere, but then you arrive in a village or town and it will have been well looked after and maintained. The women paint the buildings white every year. I'm not quite sure why it's a woman's job, but then again, I don't have to do it, so the question didn't bother me too much.
It was hard to work out where the locals would do their shopping for food or clothes or anything other than fridge magnets really, and yet they have a paintball arena!
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