Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City (15 page)

The search for a Minoan ship was temporarily on hold due to lack of funds. As a related project, Gallo was trying to arrange for equipment to map the ancient city of Akrotiri, still buried under several layers of ash. Almost half a century after Marinatos had found it, only a tiny percentage of Akrotiri has been excavated. Guesses about what surprises might still be waiting varied widely. “Maybe beneath the vineyards of Santorini there’s a giant chest of rubies and the controls of the earthshaking machine,” Gallo said, laughing.

We parked in downtown Woods Hole at WHOI’s sister campus. One of the institute’s research ships was docked in preparation for a long voyage to the West Coast. A burly man with a ponytail wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt walked past dragging a duffel bag on wheels. “He’s sure got the look of a crew member,” Gallo said as he
ushered me through the front door of a brick security building outside the marina. Two nice elderly ladies were on desk duty. “I forgot my ID badge again,” Gallo said, patting the pockets of his jeans and slowing down only slightly. “This is Mark. He’s a foreign spy with bad intentions.” As the door closed behind us I heard a faint cry of “David, wait . . .”

We paused for about ten seconds to peek through the windows of a large shed. “Here’s something you might like,” Gallo said, standing on tiptoe. Inside, laid out carefully on tables, were large yellow cylinders, the autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) used to find Air France 447. “This stuff is top secret technology. Cool, huh? Let’s go see Atlantis.”

Or rather,
Atlantis
, WHOI’s state-of-the-art 274-foot-long research vessel. Serious scientists may not always like the idea of searching for Plato’s sunken island, but they sure do like naming things after it: a space shuttle, an asteroid, an impact crater on Mars. We walked up and down staircases and across catwalks, poking our heads into tiny cabins and rooms crammed with electronics. The ship had multiple winches and cranes, an enormous globe-shaped GPS receiver, six science labs, a full-service cafeteria that seemed to be unusually well stocked with Tabasco sauce and protein bars (“a lot of companies hear about us and just send boxes of stuff,” Gallo explained), and beds for twenty-four crew members. I kept expecting to bump into Jacques Cousteau. At the end of our tour we finally reached the latest iteration of
Alvin
, the round little three-man submersible that Mavor had helped design. Its pincers were protected with boxing gloves, giving it the aspect of a chubby kid trying to defend himself. Maybe it would have to. James Cameron had just donated
Deepsea Challenger
to WHOI, which put
Alvin
in line for a demotion.

The AUVs Gallo had shown me were capable of sucking up terabytes of information, which was then processed into single images. Gallo wanted me to see some of the results. We crossed a road and
walked to the WHOI’s village campus, which seemed pretty ramshackle compared to the one Gallo worked at. At the end of a long parking lot we finally reached what looked like a windowless double-wide trailer. This was the office of William Lange, WHOI’s technical wizard. Lange was famous in oceanographic circles as one of the first people to lay eyes on the submerged
Titanic
in 1985. Gallo paused before we ascended the steps to the door. “I need to warn you: Billy’s a little prickly. But he is a genius.”

The building was dimly lighted by fluorescent bulbs and computer screens and crammed with audiovisual equipment; its interior reminded me of the mobile TV command center parked outside a stadium during a major sporting event. At the front of the main room was the largest LCD screen I had ever seen.

Lange was reclining in an office chair in front of his computer. He had gray hair and a gray beard and wore a gray shirt and black jeans. Next to Gallo’s neon glow he looked like a nocturnal forest creature caught outside his burrow. His right hand was wrapped in a bandage of some sort, so he shook my hand warily with his left.

“I told Mark that we don’t normally like to use the term
Atlantis
because it sets in motion a whole bunch of stuff that probably has no basis in reality. True?” Gallo said.

“True,” Lange said, leaning back and staring at me.

“And that there is a plausible link between Thera and the Minoans and what Plato talked about as being Atlantis,” Gallo said. Lange looked displeased. “A
plausible
link, Billy,” Gallo added. “Plausible.”

Lange folded his hands over his belt buckle. He had scowled when Gallo said the word
Atlantis
.

To break the uncomfortable silence, I asked Lange what he thought of Gallo’s plan to search for a Minoan ship. To my surprise, he seemed to think Gallo’s ambitions were too small.

“I don’t want to go down the ancient astronaut route or all that nonsense,” Lange said, leaning back farther and boring into my
eyes, “but I’m totally convinced there’s a portion of our history that’s missing. The sea level has changed significantly in the Mediterranean in the last ten thousand years. A significant part of our history and culture development is four hundred feet down. Worldwide.” As a result, the river mouths where settlements tend to be built have shifted over time, sometimes dramatically. The mouth of the Hudson River is now located a hundred miles west of where it was prior to the end of the last Ice Age. “Waterways—lakes, rivers, oceans—were the highways back then. Where would you have a city or settlement? You’d have it where a river intersected the ocean. And those aren’t where they used to be anymore. The economic capitals of multiple cultures potentially disappeared in a very, very narrow time span.”

Lange pointed out that a recent discovery of a stone axe in Crete had suggested that humans may have been sailing the Mediterranean one hundred thousand years ago. “If you go back and project what was going on in the Med from 3000 to 7000 BC, or five thousand to nine thousand years from us right now, there’s a lot of building going on, especially on islands. That’s when Santorini, Malta, Crete, Cyprus, even the Canaries—they all have big megalithic structures there that really don’t make a lot of sense. I’m hoping that by looking at some of these ancient shorelines we’ll be able to find some submerged structures that would’ve survived.”

Gallo prodded the reluctant Lange into unrolling a gigantic black-and-white photo that covered a large tabletop. “This is probably the highest-resolution data we have for any part of the ocean,” Lange said. Near the center of the image was a tiny white wedge. The bow of the
Titanic.
“My dream is to do with Akrotiri what we’ve done with
Titanic
,” he said. He hoped to combine ground-penetrating radar with high-resolution underwater images “to put Akrotiri in scope and see how big it was.”

It sounded like a massive undertaking. If the roll-out of Google
Ocean had made Atlantologists’ pulses race, a map of greater Akrotiri might result in heads exploding. “How could you even begin to plan such a project?” I asked.

“We could do it in a week if we had the money,” Lange said.

“Why don’t you show Mark some of the 3-D stuff you’ve been working on?” Gallo said.

“It’s not ready yet,” Lange said. He had returned to his chair and was reclining to the point where he appeared to be awaiting a molar extraction, but after the
Titanic
demonstration the edge in his voice had disappeared.

“Aw, come on, Billy.” Gallo turned to me. “I haven’t even seen this stuff.”

Lange pursed his lips as he thought it over. Finally, he called across the room to a young associate. “Beth, can you kill the lights and get the glasses?”

Beth left and returned with dark glasses for everyone. We put them on and stared at the enormous screen.

“This is the highest resolution underwater imagery ever collected,” Lange said as the lights dimmed. He turned to Gallo. “We’re getting toward immersion, right?”

The footage was staggering. We watched as schools of porpoises chased what looked like millions of fish. We passed over a propeller airplane, covered in decades of marine muck. A gigantic, pulsating jellyfish crossed the screen, followed by the colorful spiral of a nautilus paddling by. Everything looked as if you could reach out and touch it.

“You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me,” Gallo said.

I asked if, hypothetically, this technology could be used to locate an underwater city.

“There’s a bigger story, and it’s not that one city disappeared,” Lange said. “It’s that a hundred cities disappeared.”

At the end of his TED Talk, Gallo quoted Marcel Proust: “The
true voyage of discovery is not so much in seeking new landscapes as in having new eyes.” The prospect of using this technology to find whatever was lurking under Santorini’s ash and its surrounding waters was tantalizing. Maybe there really were a hundred cities waiting to be found, any of which might have inspired a story of a watery cataclysm.

I needed to find only one.

Kalimera!

Santorini, Greece

W
hen I arrived in Santorini, my to-do list had a single item on it: Find George Nomikos. I wasn’t entirely sure why I needed to find him. I’d gotten his contact information from the Greek tourist board in New York City. Usually when a writer contacts a country’s travel council, the people in that office bend over backward to provide far more information than the writer can possibly use, most of it relating to spas and horseback riding. Then they follow up so many times that the words
restraining order
must sometimes be deployed.

The Greeks played hard to get. Phone calls, e-mails; for weeks, I tried—and failed—to connect. Finally, as I was preparing to leave for the airport, a nice fellow named Chris called back and assured me that whatever it was I needed to do in Santorini, George Nomikos would take care of it. George and I exchanged e-mails and he promised to get in touch shortly before my arrival, but he hadn’t by the time my flight landed at Santorini’s tiny airport. I awoke on my first morning in Greece wondering what I was going to do with myself.

At 8:55 my phone rang. “
Kalimera
, Mark! That’s how we say ‘good
morning’ in Santorini! I’ll pick you up in ten minutes. We’ll have coffee at my café!”

A few minutes later I was riding shotgun in George’s white Volkswagen hatchback. George was in his early thirties, handsome, deeply tanned, with perfectly groomed black hair. His prosperous belly bulged a bit behind his pressed pink oxford. We drove through the narrow streets of Fira, Santorini’s main town, searching for a place to park as George waved at, shouted “
Kalimera!
” to, or stopped to shake hands with every other person we passed. After about ten minutes, we finally backed into a very illegal spot blocking the driveway of a hairdresser’s shop. “It’s okay; I got my hair cut here the other day,” George explained. He shouted “
Kalimera!
” to the shop’s owner and waved. We were about fifty yards from my hotel.

We walked through the tight passageways of Fira’s whitewashed old town to George’s café, Character. (The English word derives from the same ancient Greek word.) George shouted “
Kalimera!
” to the half dozen young, attractive staff members and ordered coffees for us on the terrace. The view was spectacular and, at first glance, utterly Atlantean in its circularity—totally worth the five bucks George charges for a cappuccino. It’s like looking down into a half-filled gigantic teacup from a perch on the rim. At the center of this annular basin, surrounded by deep blue water, is the island of Nea Kameni, roughly where Angelos Galanopoulos believed the Temple of Poseidon and Cleito had once stood. Steep cliffs surround most of the caldera, on this day dwarfing two gigantic cruise ships parked near shore. For many boats, dropping anchor is pointless. The Thera blast had been so powerful that the water in the four-mile-wide caldera was more than a thousand feet deep.

“Okay, Mark, so we can’t see the ruins at Akrotiri today,” George said, leaning back in his chair and adjusting his sunglasses. “There’s a strike. I know you only have two days here, so if there’s still a strike again tomorrow”—his tone seemed to imply this was a possibility
roughly on par with the sun rising in the east—“I have a friend who works in the laboratory there, cleaning artifacts. He can sneak us in through the back door.” George looked down at his phone on the table. “Right now I’m waiting for a call from Mr. Doumas.”

This was news. Because my communication with the Greek tourism board had been so sketchy, the only request I’d been able to get through was that I wanted to meet someone working at Akrotiri. If Atlantis was Santorini’s number one legend, Christos Doumas was probably runner-up. He had worked as second-in-command to Spyridon Marinatos himself and had taken over when his mentor suffered a stroke and died at Akrotiri in 1974. Doumas had been leading the excavations of the buried city for nearly four decades. If anyone had an up-to-date opinion about its connection to Plato, it would be Doumas.

George and I finished our coffees and took a walk through the claustrophobic maze of Fira’s shopping district. Archaeologists might still be debating Santorini’s status as Atlantis, but the local merchants had obviously long since made up their minds. We passed an Atlantis Hotel, an Atlantis restaurant, and several shops selling Atlantis T-shirts. For a guy who ran a busy café, George sure seemed to have a lot of side projects: He stopped to show me some guidebooks he had published, some calendars that used photos he had taken, and two or three coffee shops that sold a popular brand of espresso he imported. George grabbed a pumice stone from a basket outside one shop and handed it to me. “Good for the feet,” he said, pantomiming a scrubbing motion. I reached for my wallet but the shopkeeper waved me off. Only when we were back in George’s car did I understand his indifference. Many of Santorini’s roads had been carved through volcanic pumice more than twenty feet deep.

I finally determined that George held some sort of elected office in town, something like a city council member, but I never did find out specifics. Nor could I suss out his opinions on Santorini’s relation to Plato’s Atlantis other than a general feeling that it was good for
tourism. (His English was pretty solid but his linguistic strengths pertained to the hospitality business; my Greek consisted entirely of “
Kalimera!
”) Every few minutes, the chirping pop song of George’s ringtone emanated from his pocket. He’d check who was calling and slip the phone back into his jeans.

The strike had shut down Santorini’s many museums as well, so we didn’t have much to do except drive around the island, which seemed to please George immensely. Santorini isn’t particularly large, and George wanted to make sure I saw every inch of its tephra, the thick white layer of volcanic boulders, ash, and cinders that covers its surface like frosting on a cake. We drove through George’s village from every conceivable direction—“There’s my grandmother’s house; there’s the store where I used to buy candy; there’s my cousin;
Kalimera! Kalimera!
”—and saw some of the island’s best-known sights. We visited the famous red sand beach and the equally famous black sand beach; we drove up to the mountaintop monastery; we gazed down at an open-air pumice mine that had provided raw material for the cement that built the Suez Canal; we passed through picturesque tomato fields and vineyards, beneficiaries of the island’s rich volcanic soil. We drove through, over, and around a lot of tephra. We made our way north toward Oia, a whitewashed town perched atop the cliffs at the northern tip of Santorini’s crescent and by general consensus the prettiest spot on an island renowned for its beauty. We visited a few more stores featuring George’s various wares, including the Atlantis bookshop, passing along the way several brides in white gowns posing for photographs. I asked George why they all seemed to be Asian. “Santorini is very popular with the Chinese,” he said. “They come all this way for weddings and they
don’t even drink
!” He pounded the steering wheel to underscore this lunacy.

We descended the steep, curving two-lane road to Oia’s harbor, where George had arranged for his pal Dimitris to take us out on his
speedboat. Over the years I’ve noticed that people who live on small islands tend to fall into two categories—those who dream of escaping someday and those who couldn’t possibly imagine living elsewhere. George and Dimitris, like Anton Mifsud on Malta, belonged wholeheartedly to the second group. Dimitris was big and bearded and smiled a lot. With a cigarette dangling from his mouth he looked like a friendly Russian heavyweight gone to seed.

We circled the caldera clockwise, slapping through choppy surf. Wind stood my hair on end, and salt spray dried and crusted in a film on my glasses. I looked over at George, who was returning some phone calls. Not a hair was out of place. Occasionally, he cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and pointed at something, saying, “Mark, take a picture of that.”

Dimitris steered the boat toward Nea Kameni, Santorini’s central island. As we approached, he scrunched up his nose. “You can smell now—like a bad egg,” he said. Near the shore, sulfur had tinted the water shamrock green. On the island, tourists were marching around a smoldering crater. Geologically speaking, Nea Kameni is a newborn, having first appeared in 1707 and expanding through occasional lava growth spurts ever since. Though the volcano had been relatively quiet for more than sixty years, restaurateurs had recently noticed their wineglasses clinking together, the result of new tremors. Geologists had in recent months determined that a new “magma balloon,” a name perhaps a shade too jolly for the first sign of an inevitable volcanic apocalypse, was growing beneath Santorini’s caldera.

Back on shore, George took me to Dimitris’s waterfront restaurant and ordered enough food and wine for eight people. We finished only about two-thirds of it. Oia is famous for its sunsets, and we waited for the sun to start its descent toward the sea, as happy as a Chinese wedding party, if somewhat less sober. My eyelids began to droop. George’s phone trilled. He glanced down, sat up straight,
and took off his sunglasses. He had a brief, somewhat formal-sounding discussion in Greek with the other party.

“Mr. Doumas would like to meet us for dinner,” he said, placing his phone solemnly on the table. “Mark, thank you for making this possible. To meet Mr. Doumas is a great honor for me.”

•   •   •

Between the time George dropped me off and then picked me up for our dinner date with Doumas, I drank a very large coffee and reviewed my notes about Akrotiri. If anything, the archaeological discoveries following the Marinatos dig in the 1960s had only made it a stronger candidate for Atlantis. At the time of its burial, Akrotiri had been a thriving port city whose citizens enjoyed the prosperity of their maritime trading successes. Two- and three-story houses were built on narrow cobbled streets. Remains from storage chambers demonstrated gourmet tastes for foods both domestic and imported. A sophisticated plumbing system carried wastewater away from homes into pipes under the paving stones. Neat piles of debris and evidence of recent structural repair work seemed to indicate that Akrotiri was cleaning up from an earlier seismic shock when the Thera blast occurred. The earthquake-followed-by-catastrophe sequence paralleled the demise of Plato’s Atlantis.

The most revelatory finds had been the frescoes found adorning the walls of nearly every home. These had been preserved to a remarkable degree by their burial in ash. George had given me a pamphlet written by Doumas in which the scholar described the painting and pottery of the ancient Therans as showing Minoan influence, but displaying a looser, less formal style. One intricately detailed fresco wrapping around three walls of a second-story room could have been a panoramic snapshot taken thirty-six hundred years ago. A fleet of oared ships carrying warriors, escorted by dolphins, sails
between two towns. Well-dressed crowds have assembled in both, the smaller one bidding farewell and the larger one, which resembles Akrotiri, greeting the arrivals. It seemed possible that the scene captured a pre-eruption voyage between Crete and Thera.

•   •   •

Around eight that night, George and I drove to the southern end of Santorini, to a quiet restaurant looking out onto the infinite blackness of the Sea of Crete. George arranged for a table on the terrace where we could hear the gentle waves rolling onto the shore. Then we waited. And waited. After about forty-five minutes George nervously called Doumas, who was so absorbed in some work that he had forgotten about dinner. A few minutes later we watched a tiny, bespectacled figure slowly materialize from the direction of the Akrotiri ruins.

“I must apologize again; I was preparing slides for a presentation tomorrow and I lost track of time,” Doumas said, taking a seat across from George and me. His excellent posture and pouf of white hair gave him the bearing of a wise eagle. He spoke English with the perfectly clipped cadences of a British aristocrat and used words like
whilst
. Two women approached the table, smiling and leaning in to give him a kiss. “You see, all the ladies love me,” he said, and as further proof a gray-haired matron in a black dress and apron burst out of the kitchen and smothered Doumas with affection. When she departed, Doumas said, “She was the cook at our dig here,” with Marinatos in the 1960s. “She was fourteen years old. Now she has grandchildren.”

George poured dry Santorini white wine for the three of us, and Doumas warily inquired about my research. As the world’s leading living expert on the world’s number one Atlantis candidate, he was called on frequently to appear in documentaries and such, only to
find out later that his words had been twisted or used out of context.
9
He was visibly relieved when I told him that I wasn’t necessarily trying to prove that Santorini was Atlantis. I was more interested in trying to find out why so many others had tried to do so.

“Well, first of all because Santorini’s present shape recalls the shape of rings,” he said. “Akrotiri is the best example of a Bronze Age city in the Aegean that is so well preserved, and it is a revelation because of its high standard of living. This, combined with the shape of the island, makes people imagine things.”

“But didn’t Marinatos see a correlation between Thera and Atlantis?” I asked.

“Marinatos said that after the eruption of the volcano, obviously contacts between Crete and Egypt were interrupted. And therefore there was created a legend that an island disappeared and so on. But he says on the other hand, if this was known to the Egyptians, why does no source in Egypt mention it? We know a lot about the ancient world, thanks to the Egyptian sources, but there is nothing like that in the Egyptian literature.”

Had I been less intimidated and afraid of embarrassing George, who was sitting quietly with his hands folded, like an altar boy listening to a homily, I might have argued that whether or not the disappearance of Thera appears in the Egyptian chronicles was, like most things Atlantean, open to interpretation. I might also have noted that Marinatos had sometimes indulged ambiguity for the sake of drawing attention (and money) to Akrotiri, to the degree that people still argued about whether he’d said Thera was Atlantis or not.