Day 23 – May 8 Sunday

A sleep-in this morning, even though the ship was docked at Heraklios on the island of Crete, we couldn’t disembark before 8.00am as the Palace of Knossos didn’t open until 8.30.  The drive to the Palace of Knossos took about 25 minutes & our local guide Fulia filled us in on some of the history of the Minoan civilization, the people that built & lived in the palace.  This site is the oldest we have seen so far, built around 2,000BC (that’s 4,000 years ago).  The excavation of this palace was commenced in the 1800s by a Greek, then in the early 1900s a British archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans spent 30 years of his life at the site.  Then French, Italian & Greek teams excavated the three other smaller palaces on different parts of Crete.  The Palace of Knossos was where King Minos of the Minoan civilization lived,  it had around 1,500 rooms & was three stories high.  Parts of the palace have been partly reconstructed to give an idea of how it may have looked all those years ago before being destroyed by a large earthquake.  The reconstruction also includes copies of some of the frescoes found in remarkably good condition on some of the walls.  The original stone throne of King Minos is intact & still in it’s original position.  This palace also has the first known flushing toilet, this civilization was that advanced.  Fulia took us over all parts of the palace, explaining in great detail the different parts, functions & relevance to history.  We ended the tour of the Palace of Knossos at the theatre, capable of holding 3,000 people & is the oldest known theatre.  The road off to the palace of the High Priest is still in great condition & its hard to believe it was laid 4,000 years ago.  Back to the bus, port & ship, it was up anchor & off to Santorini.

We lunched onboard on the way to Santorini & I had a brief sleep before we ventured out on the top deck to watch Santorini come into view.  We quickly raced downstairs again to get our coats as it was very cool outside.  Santorini suffered a massive volcanic eruption around 1450 BC that destroyed the existing towns & left the island completely changed (there is a belief that Atlantis was the sunken city as records describe a very similar region).  The ship motored into the massive flooded caldera of the volcano & stopped without anchoring, at 400 metres it is too deep to drop anchor, then the tender boats came out to take us ashore.  The imposing steep cliff sides of the volcano dominate the harbour, with a sprinkling of white houses dusting the rim of the caldera.  One of the islands in the middle of the harbour is the cone of the still active volcano, still steaming & smoking, rising from the sea 500 years ago.   We disembarked at the tiny port of Athinios at the base of the massive cliff & then the bus zigzagged slowly up the long climb to the rim.  It is so high up, the photos don’t give a real perspective on how high it really is.

It took 25 minutes for the bus to reach the tiny township of Oia on the northern tip of the caldera, passing through Fira, the main town, on the way.  The houses on Santorini are typically small, dazzling white with blue windows & doors, lots of windows, vaulted roofs & built seemingly randomly joined & on top of each other, stretching down the slopes of the volcano rim.  The many churches have stark blue domes contrasting vividly with the whitewashed walls.  Oia has to be the prettiest town we have seen, no wonder it is on all the promotional photos of Greece, it is stunning.  In Oia we walked through the narrow cobblestone streets to the very end, a medieval battlement perched on the cliff top with a commanding view over the tiny fishing port below, the village of Oia & the caldera.  We walked & explored the tiny streets of the village, taking lots of photos & dodging lots of other tourists before boarding the bus back to Fira.  We walked the main shopping streets of Fira, again being awed by the views of the village & the harbour far below before boarding the cable car for the 2 minute trip to the tiny port of Skala far below.  Back to the ship via the tender, dinner & bed.  Santorini is the prettiest place we have seen all trip, it really is stunningly beautiful.