We spent a long time on Santorini (aka Thera). A lot of stuff happened there that gets archeologists all excited, and since one was leading the tour...
The island -- well, islands; there's a main one an three smaller ones -- of Santorini are volcanic, and the volcanoes tend to go boom from time to time. The most famous(?) of the explosions was the one that happened around the time the Minoan civilization collapsed. Modern dating methods show that the Minoans had imploded long after Thera blew, tho.
Still, lots of things from that period to see, including Akrotiri, a town marvelously preserved by being buried in volcanic ash.
The best pictures from Santorini
The lower city of Fira, seen from the upper city at dusk.
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The road from Fira to the main port. (Yeah, you can just see it in the
previous picture.) The port is below Fira because the other side of the
island -- with the gentle slope -- is far too windy for ships to dock.
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A tourist ship at dusk.
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One of several excellent sunsets. Amazingly enough, even I can get a few
good pictures if I take enough of them.
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The Daphne crater on Nea Kameni. It's named after the warship that
signaled to Fira that the volcano was about to erupt, so the Firans could
evacuate.
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The port on Nea Kameni.
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A view of Fira from near the top of the volcano on Nea Kameni.
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A texture shot of the water and seafloor at the tourist port.
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Because Santorini is so windy, grapes can't be grown on trellises. (They'd
dry out and wither.) So vintners on Santorini weave the branches into baskets,
and grow grapes on the ground.
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There are a lot of sites on Santorini: the dig at Akrotiri, the Archeological Museum, where most of the
artifacts from Akrotiri ended up, a black sand beach and a winery
with a museum. We took the cable
cars to the tourist port to
catch a boat to Nea Kameni,
where the current active volcano is.
