Santorini: The Gift of Finding Peace Again
A small apartment, a terrace with a table for one, a city emerging from the ash. Where peace came back.
There was a table for one on the terrace. I remember noticing that, the first morning, and noticing that it did not make me sad. A little plunge pool beside it. Cool water, warm stone, the sea just beyond.
This was the beautiful little apartment, and it was the first thing Santorini gave me.
The lanes
Every lane on that island seems to end in blue. I wandered them slowly, in no hurry to arrive anywhere at all. That is the whole method, if there is one. You start walking and the island decides where you end up: a chapel on the cliffs, a set of steps, a view that stops you.
In the late afternoon the whitewash turns warm and honey-coloured, and the rooftops go golden, and you understand why people have been painting this place for as long as there has been paint.
The city under the ash
I had not expected the history to move me as much as the sea did. There is an excavation on the island that stretches on and on. An entire city, patiently emerging from the ash that buried it thousands of years ago.
Elegant pottery, painted all that time ago and somehow still full of life. An intricate table, kept whole by the very ash that buried it. I stood in front of that table for a long while. Something destroyed and preserved by the same event. I did not need anyone to explain to me why that spoke to me.
The water
One afternoon I sailed the caldera as the light turned soft. Kayakers passed beneath the volcanic cliffs, tiny against all that dark stone. The sunset over the Aegean is best seen from the water, and I saw it from the water, and then I saw one more from the rooftops, savoured slowly.
There is a bar that stretches right out over the sea. Irresistible. I went.
What it gave me
The geography, the history, the people. I came for beauty and calm and I found them, but I found something else as well, which I did not have a name for until I was home.
It was a gift of healing.
I am grateful for that apartment, and for that island, in a way that is hard to put in a sentence. Peace, it turns out, is not an idea. It has an address. Mine, for a while, was a terrace with a table for one and the whole blue sea in front of it.