New York- I have a new vlog out on my Fabled City channel this week where I explore the sprawling Bronze Age trading centre known as Akrotiri on the Cycladic island of Thera, known far more widely as Santorini. I’d been to these dusty warrens trapped in time before but this time around approached them with a more nuanced appreciation. That was precisely because I’ve become gradually fascinated of late by the Bronze Age in the greater eastern Mediterranean and its ignominious collapse .
When we think of the comparative advancements of the ancient world in a Western context, we most often recall Greece and later Rome that epitomise the artistic and scientific zeniths of the Classical Age. But knowing that the Bronze Age was so much earlier and far more advanced than I’d really ever been aware of is intensely intriguing. That is was so incredibly long beforehand with the Iron Age and Archaic Age coming in between these periods makes the Bronze Age and its subsequent ever more so fascinating.
Far from the throngs of tourists overwhelming the footpaths of Oia and Fira, Akrotiri stands in relative silence on the far other end of the island in both tribute to, and marking of, the tragedy of the Theran volcanic eruption around 1600 BC. We don’t truly know who the Akrotirians were, the language they spoke, nor the gods they venerated. But we can see what they built, preserved in ash for eternity, more than a millennia before the grandeur of the Hellenes whose magnificent Acropolis monopolises our notions of the Greek world before Christendom.