Europe

Thira

According to Wikipedia:

When large ships visit they typically anchor in the caldera and use their tenders or the local ferry services to take passengers ashore as did the ship I came here on in 1988. Modern cruise ships like Oosterdam don't anchor, they simply hold station, using their electric drives (side thrusters and azipods)

In the Caldera. No lines out -modern cruise ships like Oosterdam don't anchor

Our bus tour's first stop, once ashore, was Akrotiri, sometimes called the Greek Pompeii as the town was preserved by being buried in volcanic ash. 

The difference being that this burial event was 1,600 years earlier, during the early bronze age.

Unlike Pompeii, no entombed bodies were found, neither were their tools or weapons so archaeologists conclude that the city was evacuated in and orderly manner before it was buried, Indeed, there is evidence of a previous event, after which they returned and cleared up.

So all we know is from their paintings and artefacts.  Many jars and other ceramic objects have been unearthed and several pieces of abandoned furniture were buried and their form recreated by pouring plaster into the voids left in the ash.  One of these was a three legged votive(?) table of remarkable sophistication.

The whole town is quite remarkable. It contained four storey town houses with running water and sewerage using clay pipes, plumbed to a central facility outside the town. The walls were decorated with frescoes and bathroom floors tiled. 

Our guide, who was impressed by the sophistication of the women's fashions, but wanted to make things mysterious, particularly their imagined religion, asserted that Minoans couldn't read and write.  I protested: "then how many casks of wine did they need to trade for a dress?" but was slapped down.

Yet, given the sophistication of their technology, her assertion is clearly ridiculous.  Bronze making, alone, is an elaborate multi-stage process, requiring different ores, techniques and furnace temperatures and some recorded system of weights and measures.  And trading in copper and tin; or wine; or olive oil; or gold; or almost anything; requires a system of equivalent values, even before currency when these equivalences were determined by bartering or market trading.  A large quantity of elaborately marked clay seals has also been found, which may be indicating: ownership; contents; quantity; or value.   The museum on Crete suggests that metal ingots may have provided a standard of exchange (think the 'gold standard' of not so long ago).

In fact, Akrotiri (as we call it), was a wealthy maritime trading town with records made and kept in Linear A script.

Wikipedia tells us:

Linear A is so ancient that, in the absence of a 'Rosetta Stone', remains undecipherable. One difficulty in translation is that we don't know their language or fully understand their religion.  

 One observation is that the town had no defensive structures. But it was an outpost of Minoan Crete the dominant naval power for a thousand years, so enemies were probably restricted to pirates and met at sea. 

The lesson I took away, back in 1988, was how close humanity got to the modern world - but for some bad ideas about how the universe works (intervening gods and so on).

My 1988 photos. When I was here in 1988 there was a different roof.
That one fell down in an earthquake; then, in 2005, a new roof collapsed during construction, killing a tourist.
The roof seen today is a second replacement and seems pretty solid to me. 

Comparing my old photos with the new its clear that one or both roof collapses damaged the taller structures - hopefully those amazing frescos, still on site in 1988, were successfully conserved.  

From Akrotiri, in the south, our bus travelled the whole length of the picturesque island to Oia in the north. 

Oia is probably the most photographed location in Greece.  Unfortunately, due to the presence of three cruise ships, one larger than ours, it was packed with people in places shoulder-to-shoulder.  I very quickly tired of this scrum and made a retreat to a pleasant cafe where I ordered a coffee and a cake and just admired the view. 

It's a tough life 

Our bus was soon to leave for Fira/Ipapantis where we would have some lunch then catch the cable-car down to the ferry stop and back to our ship.

The tough life continued - a nice meal and great view 

Unfortunately, the cable-car turned out to be an issue that soured the experience for many, as several thousand people attempted to catch the same cable car.  This consisted of a string of six six-person gondolas going down every four of five minutes the balancing string coming back empty. You can see them in the photo above. I estimated it has a capacity less than 500 passengers per hour. The two hour queue was half a kilometre long. The ferries were equally inadequate. Another (shorter) queue at the bottom.  Some decided to walk down the road used by the donkeys, the white zig-zag in the photograph above.  Unfortunately, it was slippery with donkey-doo and one of our companions at the dinner table that night had slipped and injured herself.

Our next stop would be Mykonos