History provides a repertoire of reference points that help us confront risk and uncertainty. Some of them insert current events into the longue durée of an Aegean space in which volcanic and seismic activity are a constant and recurring feature. Others focus on moments of crisis (1650, 1950) against which the specifics of the present situation can be compared and evaluated. Let us take a step back, primarily to appreciate that people in the past were every bit as startled and powerless then as we are now in the face of a similar reality.
On the morning of 23 May 1707, the people of Santorini were startled to discover that a new island had appeared overnight in the midst of their archipelago. Of course, the archipelago laid out before them was itself the product of the Minoan eruption of the 16th century BC, with the original islands of Thira, Thirasia and Aspronisi already supplemented by Palaia Kameni (‘Old Burned’) and Mikri Kameni (‘Little Burned’) in 197 BC and AD 1570-1573 respectively.
The new island that emerged in 1707 and was subsequently christened Nea Kameni (‘New Burned’) would be united a century and a half later with Mikri Kameni, thanks to new eruptions that lasted through into the mid-20th century: three centuries later, Nea Kameni remains one of the Mediterranean’s ‘newest’ islands!
The opening of the well-known volcano on the islet of Nea Kameni that lies in the iconic Caldera off the island of Santorini in the background.
This volcanic and seismic activity lasted several centuries and is extensively documented, especially for the 17th and 18th centuries, in travelers’ accounts, diplomatic correspondence, folk songs and reports sent back to Rome by Catholic missionaries dispatched to convert the Orthodox Cyclades. The Ottoman masters of the Aegean also drew attention to the ongoing nature of the phenomenon—though some accounts are less reliable than others. Evliya Çelebi (1611-1682), for instance, claimed to have witnessed an eruption when he visited the island in 1670. However, the celebrated Ottoman traveler seems simply to have embellished detailed descriptions he had read of an explosion which had occurred 20 years prior to his visit, in September-December 1650, with unsubstantiated elements to construct a volcanic experience of his own.
The emergence of Nea Kameni in 1707 was literally an earth-shattering event. But ‘event’ is used here somewhat elastically, because the explosion and its ongoing impacts continued through until 1712. These were five years of intense volcanic and seismic activity, and five years of uncertainty for the inhabitants of the archipelago, as they were confronted with upheavals that literally reconstructed the landscape they had grown up with and in.
The episode of 1707-1712 is recounted in a report by the Jesuit missionary Jacques Bourneon, which would go on to serve as a source for a rich body of scientific and literary writings on the phenomena. In the first decade of the 18th century, newspaper articles, consular reports and scientific treatises stirred a keen interest among European scholars in volcanic and seismic phenomena and their still unfathomable causes. That’s because it wasn’t just Santorini that embarked on a period of intense volcanic activity: in a period marked by extreme phenomena corresponding to one of the coldest phases of the “Little Ice Age”, Vesuvius, Piton de la Fournaise on Island, and even Fujiyama in Japan all awoke from dormancy, too. The majority of eye witnesses were ignorant of this connection, which sketches in the contours of a global history of “natural disasters”. Still, the people of Santorini knew how to interpret these events at a local level. At the height of the eruption, some sought refuge on other islands, while reports say the winds carried ash as far afield as Asia Minor.
From the Bourneon report, let us focus on the issue of how to evaluate the nature of natural phenomena. While the expression “volcanic island” evokes images of leaping flames, columns of smoke and escaping gases, Nea Kameni appeared silently and under cover of night, as if to distance itself as far as possible from the traditional image of a natural disaster. Even better: the new island was discovered due to a misunderstanding. Initially, eye witnesses thought they were looking at a beached ship, and the local sailors set sail in the hope of salvaging what they could from the wreck. It was only when they got closer that they realized “it was a reef, which was starting to emerge from the depths and which was still hard to make out.
Therasia island.
The next day, two dozen people, both clergy and laity, wanted to visit it, out of curiosity about such a rare sight and because they could not believe what our sailors were saying. But once they arrived at the spot, they were fully convinced by the evidence of their own eyes and could no longer doubt the fact.” The new island is real—so real, in fact, the islanders believe they will soon be able to cultivate it. It won’t take them long to realize this isn’t going to be the case; the geologists and naturalists from all over Europe who continue to ask for samples of the new rock will eventually reach the same conclusion.
An aerial photo shows the arc-shaped island of Santorini in the background with the smaller isle of Thirasia (bottom-left), and the islet of Nea Kameni. /Wikimedia Commons
This empirical and phenomenological “first” forms a bridge between the past and present attitudes toward an equally impressive present. For us, the explosion of 1707 is distant in time if not in space. However, viewing it through the intersecting perspectives of the scholar, the fisherman and the missionary reveals something persistent and familiar about how we conceive of our relationship with nature. The initial appearance of May 1707 was only the first stage in a five-year process in which periods of calm alternated with the resumption of volcanic and seismic events. The latter were accompanied by the emission of gas and smoke, sudden increases in water temperature, deadly fumes, explosions of incandescent rock, falling ash and lava flows. Indeed, the phenomena were so numerous that they were interpreted by eyewitnesses of the time—Bourneon first and foremost among them—as evidence of God’s anger.
In fact, religious interpretations of natural events are omnipresent in the historical accounts, where they translate into a proliferation of rituals of atonement and intercession—the public prayers and “long and painful” litanies around which the islanders came to organize their daily lives, for instance. What can we learn from this history of events which happened 300 plus years ago? Simply this: that we are every bit as powerless before natural “disturbances”, and that it is supremely difficult to understand their logic or predict their consequences in the short or longer term. And this: while technological progress might seem to reduce the risks and uncertainty, certain natural events remain fundamentally unresponsive to it, to the point that they trigger fears both ancient and deeply contemporary.
Mathieu Grenet is a senior lecturer in Modern History at the University of Toulouse II. The text if from a lecture he gave at the University of Geneva in November 2024.
