Santorini – The South of the Island – Emboreio

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Emboreio

Emboreio (sometimes known as nimboreio; 8km) is the largest and most attractive of the island’s inland villages. As often on Santorini, many of the oldest parts are built half-underground. In the midst of its tight tissue of passageways and streets are occasional sunken areas with a cluster of grotto-entrances and troglodyte dwellings. At the centre of the village is a fortified kastro, arranged around the church of the Panaghia.Near to it and beside the church of Aghios Charalambos are several ancient column fragments and spolia, suggesting that Emboreio could possibly occupy the site of the main settlement of Ancient Eleusis, whose cemetery lies, as we shall see, to the south of here, behind the port. The architecture of Emboreio is unusual and attractive; in contrast to the simple forms of the houses, the churches—especially the porticoes and belfries of the church of Christos and of the Panaghia—have an almost baroque insistence on trefoil and multi-foil forms. Their belltowers are remarkable creations. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir visited Emboreio before the Second World War. Sartre later had the village in mind as the setting for his adaptation of the Electra legend, Les Mouches (1943).
   The main road ends at the resort of Peri­ssa (11km), which like Kamari stretches behind a beach of black, volcanic sand ending abruptly beneath the bulk of Mesa Vouno, this time on the south side. Scattered across the modern settlement near the foot of the mountain are several areas of excavation where remains of houses—thresholds and walls of the roman and Hellenistic period—are being revealed. Behind the southeast corner of the dominating church of the Ti­mios Stavros (Venerable Cross), sunk be low the level of the church’s surrounding patio, is the well preserved base of a marble funerary monument of the 1st century ad in the form of a circular tower: each block has been meticulously faceted at the rim and the three existing courses of masonry stand on a finely moulded base course. By the northeast corner of the same church are two standing columns of the same epoch. Between the church and the cliff are the ruins of the Early Christian basilica of Aghia Irini, after which the island took its name. It was probably founded in the 5th century, enlarged in the 6th century, abandoned, and then re-roofed in an improvised fashion in the 13th century. Its walls, and the large building to its northwest, incorporate material from pre-existing pagan structures.

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