The view that's actually a scar

Everyone photographs this view the same way, white buildings, blue domes, that dramatic drop down to the sea. What most people don't see is that the drop isn't a coastline. It's the rim of a volcano.

Around 1600 BC, one of the biggest eruptions of the last ten thousand years blew the middle out of this island, and the caldera everyone leans over the railing to photograph is what was left behind. Down at Akrotiri, the Bronze Age town the ash buried, archaeologists have never found a single body. The ground shook enough beforehand that people had time to get out, and clear enough that some of them went back in for their things before it was over.

I painted Oia in watercolour and ink, all that white against the blue. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard.

Shop the poster here: Oia, Santorini · Travel Poster