Santorini Day 3

Thursday morning was quite windy. We had to eat our breakfast inside rather than out on the terrace as we'd planned. It was both windy and foggy, with small periods of rain, so we decided to relax for a bit in our hotel room. Once the weather improved, we headed down to Fira to walk around for a bit to check things out.

We decided to head to the bus station to catch a bus to Kamira to see the ruins of Ancient Thira. But before doing so, headed to find lunch at Nikolas Tavern in Fira. For lunch we had a greek salad and some unexpectedly good chicken souvlaki. Then we rushed off to catch the bus to Kamira only to hear the station operator tell us that Ancient Thira closes at 2pm (we should have noticed that our guidebook says the same thing).

So we headed back towards Firostefani, climing all the steps for the second or third time of many to come. Along the way we stopped at the Nomikos Conference Center where the current exhibit is the "Wall Paintings of Thera" (http://www.santonet.gr/exhibitions/nomikos.htm).

This exhibit houses sophisicated 3d replicas of the wall paintings found at Akrotiri, the pre 1600 b.c. eruption city of the island of Santorini. We had seen a few of the originals in the Archeological Museum in Athens, and some others are in the Museum of Prehistoric Thera in Fira, but one of the neat things about the exhibition is that you can see them all in one place and there are replicas of several that are not available to the public anywhere. The method used to replicate the wall paintings is very cool; they take stereo images and create a topography of the painting so that they can recreate every bump and crack. Then they construct the canvas based on this and transfer photographic emulsions onto this synthetic substrate.

After leaving the exhibition, we headed back up toward Firostefani for dinner. We stopped in at Mama Thira again and were well pleased with their Santorini salad and sea bass.