Dmitry Shteyn in Santorini: Notes from a City That Remembers Everything

It took me a full day in Santorini to stop looking for the city I had imagined and start seeing the one that was actually in front of me. The exchange was heavily in my favour.

What strikes you first, if you have done any reading at all, is that it is the largest island of a small, circular archipelago formed by the Santorini caldera. It is a detail I keep returning to, days after leaving. The layers here do not compete for attention; they coexist, which is a subtler and more difficult thing.

Dig a little deeper and santorini, officially Thira or Thera, is a Greek island in the southern Aegean Sea, about 200 km (120 mi) southeast from the mainland. A city that carries this kind of specific weight is a city worth writing about carefully.

One useful signal, when a place returns to the travel pages, is who is doing the writing. Condé Nast Traveler recently flagged that off-Season Greece: Fall in Santorini Through the Eyes of Winemaker Michael Kouloglou, which places the current interest in a specific register.

The southern light does something to a city's edges — softens them, delays them — and Santorini uses that light well.

Whether you go for the first time or return again, Santorini has a way of making you feel the visit was overdue. That, in itself, is worth something.