Santorini and Sinking Ships

Many believe Santorini is the lost city of Atlantis and if you've ever seen a travel agency brochure of Greece it probably had a picture of Santorini on the front. Oh, then there's that other place, in Athens - a hilltop with a temple.

Santorini Island (Thera), Greece is a volcanic crater flooded by the Aegean Sea. I sailed into the caldera in 1994 aboard a ship smaller than the one in the clip below, looking up in awe at the hundreds of white houses clinging to the edge of the 1000-foot crater wall. From a distance it looks like snow.

Bowles wrote, "How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?" Looking back, I'll probably never sail in a storm like I did one night in the Aegean. The ship was rolling so much that the large wine bottle the magician was using in the ship's entertainment salon kept tipping over. After the show I stepped out onto the deck. In the darkness the waves seemed to peak higher than the ship.

My bed sat perpendicular to the bow so, lying there, my feet would rise up, then my head, then my feet . . . I slept like a baby. The next day all the passenger's were complaining how sick they were all night.






Aboard the ship I met a beautiful woman from Johannesburg (Joburg as she called it). She was not black nor Afrikaner but of Greek extraction who was arranging to vote by absentee ballot in the upcoming landmark election in South Africa. She said she was voting for Nelson Mandela.

Curiously, under the loose nametag on my life preserver it read "Angelina Lauro." Turns out it was from the sister ship to the Achille Lauro, famous for the 1985 hijacking (and killing of Leon Klinghoffer). I thought they had simply changed my ship's name for publicity purposes but have since learned that the Angelina Lauro sank in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 1979 while being towed after a fire at port in the Virgin Islands. My life preserver, I guess, was salvage. Remarkably, the Achille Lauro also sank (off the coast of Somalia) a few months after my trip.



A Minoan fresco of a fisherman (which I remember from an art class) excavated at Akrotiri, a Santorini village buried by a volcanic eruption in the 17th century, B.C.

Sinking of the SEA DIAMOND
This is a clip of MS Sea Diamond which sank in April 2007 at Santorini. The song is by Greek artist, Ralia Xristidou (her face could launch a thousand ships):