2,500 years ago,
Ancient Greeks told of a terrifying catastrophe...
...the destruction of Atlantis.
It was a tale of utter devastation and carnage...
and has captivated the world for over 2,000 years.
Atlantis, a once glittering city that had ruled the waves
now sunk beneath them,
obliterated from the face of the Earth
by a terrible natural disaster.
Atlantis was described as one of the greatest places on Earth -
luxurious, rich and powerful.
But for centuries, people have wondered,
was it just a story or did such an amazing city ever exist
before it sank beneath the waves?
Now I'm on a journey through Greece to find out
if there's any fact buried amongst the fiction.
From clues hidden at the tops of mysterious mountains
to discoveries buried deep beneath the ground,
I'll trace the extraordinary story
of the search for this legendary world.
He wants this to be Atlantis? He really wants this to be Atlantis.
'Exploring today's incredible hunt for the ancient lost city...'
I was determined to find it.
..|'ll uncover a world of luxury and beauty
and evidence of brutal destruction.
And I'll dive beneath the waves to find remains of an ancient city
buried beneath the scenes.
Incredible archaeological discoveries,
extraordinary detective work.
This is the hunt for the real lost city of Atlantis.
I love being in Greece.
I love the landscape, the rugged mountains
and then the beautiful coastline and the sea.
I love the fact there are so many historic sites to visit here.
It's a place of magic, a place of mystery,
and really, there's no bigger mystery
than the strange Ancient Greek story of the city of Atlantis,
which lies underneath the waves.
It seems very unlikely, and yet, I'm off to visit a place now
where I've been told that's exactly what I'm gonna see.
The first destination on my hunt for Atlantis is Pavlopetri,
an isolated spot on the barren, southernmost tip of mainland Greece,
where the ancient fragments of a destroyed lost city
lie beneath the waves, like the legendary Atlantis.
There is an air of mystery
surrounding this beautiful stretch of coastline.
The rocky shore is covered with strange crater-like pits
where human bones have been discovered.
The waves lap against huge stone blocks that look manmade.
But for thousands of years,
no-one had really investigated what was going on here...
until a British archaeologist, Nicholas Flemming,
arrived at Pavlopetri, hunting for sunken sites.
just like today,
the beach was scattered with shards of ancient pottery.
You can see these two bits here...
Actually, this is a much better piece.
Look, it's like the rim of a drinking vessel
or a storage container.
And you can tell that this pottery
had all been rubbed very smooth by the actions of the waves.
It had probably been washed ashore from somewhere just out there.
So, he put on his scuba gear and went swimming,
and instantly, he starts to see wonderful things.
Over the next year, he would uncover a submerged ancient city.
Had he found Atlantis?
These waters can get quite rough,
churning up the sand and burying everything,
so I'm really hoping that
some of what Flemming saw back in 1967 is still visible.
Luckily, I've got local diver George to guide me,
and he knows this seabed like the back of his hand.
OK, here goes. Let's go and see what's beneath the waves.
'The sea is fairly shallow here,
'so I don't have to dive too deep to explore.'
It's amazing! The water is beautifully clear.
At first, you're looking at shells and bits of rock...
then you swim a bit closer, and you realise...
these are shards of broken pottery from thousands of years ago.
'Although the water's clear,
'years of rough seas have buried what Flemming saw back in the '60s,
'and you have to look carefully to see any remains.
'But when you do get your eye in,
'you can see straight lines in the rocks.'
Those rocks are far too neatly lined,
they're far too straight to be put there by nature.
'They look like a wall.
'And George tells me that this was once the wall of someone's house.
'Shifting sands have covered the rest,
'but I'm swimming over the foundations
'of an entire neighbourhood here.
'By scanning the seabed, archaeologists have been able
'to piece together the remains of the city and a sense of its layout.
'You can make out rectangular shapes,
'which they identified as buildings and courtyards.
'There are rows upon rows of them spreading across the sea floor.
'And there's not only the homes of the living,
'but the graves of the dead.
'They stretch all the way from the beach to under the water.'
It looks like these... these holes...
These, I think... This must be the cemetery.
These must be graves.
Oh!
Well, I visit ancient sites all over the world,
I've been high in the mountains, I've been in deep jungles,
but I have never dived on an ancient site beneath the waves.
Marine archaeologists now think that Pavlopetri vanished 3,500 years ago,
a century before the famous Pharaoh Tutankhamun ruled Egypt.
It's thought that it was hit by an earthquake
and then submerged under the sea as the waters rose -
a real echo of the Atlantis story,
the legendary lost city beneath the sea.
Unless you know what's beneath the waves here,
this just feels like a lovely, remote beach, a beautiful spot,
but in fact, down there,
there is the remains of a thriving, a bustling ancient city.
The buildings would have been up to two storeys high,
packed together.
They would have been trading with the Aegean Islands,
round in the Ionian.
This was a busy, dynamic place of life,
but now all that's left are a few foundations beneath the waves...
...and the graves of their dead.
So, could this really be a match for the spectacular city
and the events described in the Atlantis story?
Well, I think it's a possibility.
But this is a region plagued by earthquakes and volcanoes.
So, now my hunt for Atlantis
is taking me to where the story began, Athens,
where I'll discover that Pavlopetri is not the only candidate
for that lost world.
And I'll get a new lead that takes me to a buried ancient city
on Greece's biggest island.
It sounds so similar to Atlantis.
Athens... home to some of the greatest ancient monuments
and archaeological treasures in the world.
2,500 years ago,
it was here that one of its most famous residents
first told the incredible story of Atlantis.
I've come to one of his favourite hangouts, the Agora,
back then, the central meeting place in Athens.
This place would have been a hive of activity,
people coming here to shop, to chat, to gossip,
day and night, anyone who was anyone -
beggars, tradesmen and politicians.
And, of course, philosophers.
And the most famous of them was Plato,
the man who first tells us about Atlantis and how it was destroyed.
To discover the real inspiration behind Atlantis,
I need to get to the bottom of exactly what Plato wrote.
All right, come on, then, the big question -
Atlantis - fact or fiction?
You had to start with the hardest question! Yes! Let's get into it.
jasmine Elmer is an expert on Ancient Greece.
I would say it's definitely a story,
but with little reality sprinkles on top.
Hang on, that sounds a bit philosophical to me.
There wasn't actually a city called Atlantis?
No, there's no real city called Atlantis.
It's a mythical place that's made up by the philosopher Plato.
But I can go looking for the places that might have inspired Plato.
Yeah, totally right. What you will find is potentially
these kind of places that have a similar story about them
that could have inspired the story of Atlantis.
So, how does he describe it?
Well, he talks about it being this kind of huge island
that's out in the Atlantic Ocean,
which, to Greeks, is this kind of like
vague space somewhere over there, but it's absolutely huge.
Is it kind of a flourishing civilisation?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, first of all, it's a land rich in resources,
so they had their own minerals and metals that they could mine.
They had fertile plains,
so they could grow loads of amazing fruit and vegetables.
They had exotic animals, even, like elephants.
They also imported a lot of goods as well.
So, they had lots of luxury around them,
colourfultemples and palaces as well.
Essentially, what the Greeks would perceive
as a very advanced civilisation.
So, it's a sort of idealised picture of a society.
Completely that, exactly that. It's like an almost utopian society.
Everything kind of seems on the surface
as being a perfect place that you'd wanna live.
To begin with, the picture Plato paints of Atlantis is idyllic...
...a sprawling, prosperous city surrounded by olive trees...
a busy port filled with ships...
...magnificent squares and luxurious bathhouses.
But it doesn't stay that way for long.
In the story, this perfect city is hit by a cataclysmic earthquake...
before a terrifying tsunami buries it beneath the waves.
And Plato had a moral to his tale.
It's obviously a natural disaster, but it comes from the gods
as a punishment for being too big for your boots,
for trying to expand and be greedy.
The Atlanteans decide that
they wanna expand their empire and take over,
and they actually wanna invade Athens as well,
and that's a big no-no for Plato.
So the message is,
if you are an advanced civilisation and it's all hunky dory and great,
don't get too big for your boots cos bad things can happen to you,
like what happens at Atlantis.
And Plato was living in a society where the Earth moves quite a lot.
Exactly. I mean, this is what the reality sprinkles was
that I mentioned earlier on
because absolutely, the Greeks are living in a world
where natural disasters are occurring.
That's where you get this kind of modern idea
that Atlantis is this submerged city that we might be able to find.
Interesting. I've been to Pavlopetri,
so there are places around Greece they would have known about
which are underwater.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's an amazing sight,
fantastic, like, beautiful and so much you can take from it.
Could it have influenced Plato? It's possible,
but it kind of happened around 1,000 years before Plato,
so would Plato know about it? Maybe.
But there are definitely these sorts of things happening over Greece
that definitely could have inspired Plato in his storytelling.
I'm going to rule out Pavlopetri as a candidate for Atlantis.
From what I saw, it doesn't feel grand enough
for tales of its destruction to have survived 1,000 years.
I need a new lead,
a place that sounds more believable, more spectacular.
150 years ago,
there was a breakthrough archaeological discovery
at a place that I think might fit the bill,
a place on Greece's largest island to the south of here.
99 miles from Athens across the Aegean Sea,
that island is Crete.
And the extraordinary discovery made here
late in the 19th century changed everything.
Suddenly, people began to wonder
if Crete could have been the inspiration for Atlantis.
Like Plato's island, it's massive, covering over 3,000 square miles.
And in Plato's time, it was the setting for many epic tales.
In 1877, a man who was brilliantly called Minos,
after the legendary king who'd once ruled over this island,
discovered some strange large stone blocks
just down there in a place called Knossos.
Not much was made of it at the time
because the island was embroiled in a bitter war,
but word of it did get out.
And 20 years later, a famous British archaeologist arrived in Crete.
He was on a mission to investigate the mysterious finds.
His name was Arthur Evans.
Evans spent six years negotiating and haggling
to gain permission to investigate the site.
Finally, in March 1900,
with an army of 30 men, he began to dig.
There was no more time to waste.
Almost at once, their efforts were rewarded.
As they shovel led away mountains of dirt from this section here,
they revealed these huge stone blocks,
which seem to be forming a corridor.
This was the first glimpse
that something monumental really lay beneath their feet -
a possible Atlantis.
With mounting anticipation, they carried on digging.
And then, just three weeks later, on the 5th April 1900,
Evans came face to face with something incredible.
Early that morning,
the team were clearing some dirt off on the standing walls,
and they started to see what looked like an image painted beneath.
It was damaged, but soon, features were visible.
It was a human,
it was life-size with rich red skin, slim waist...
eyes shaped almost like almonds,
and it was holding a cup.
Nothing like this had been seen before.
Evans guessed that it was ancient.
In fact, no-one had looked into those eyes for 3,500 years.
This amazing discovery was the first glimpse
that an ancient civilisation lay lost and buried here,
just like Atlantis.
It was the start of a rapid succession
of spectacular find after find.
Painted corridors... rooms full of magnificent jars...
...and grand staircases.
And then on Apr“ the 13th,
after eight more days of frenzied, backbreaking digging,
the team worked their way to this spot.
Evans was about to uncover
the most remarkable, game-changing discovery of his life.
At first, it wasn't clear what he'd found.
It was a finely crafted room,
and there was evidence of beautiful paintings on these walls.
There were benches along the edges,
then there were steps leading down to this strange sunken pit
that reminded Evans of a communal bathhouse
that you might find in a Roman site.
But then he made an astonishing discovery.
just opposite the pit, there was a beautifully crafted chair.
In Evans's mind, suddenly, this was not a bathroom -
this was a throne room, the heart of some ancient royal palace.
Gradually, an incredible lost world
was coming back to life before their eyes.
News of the remarkable discoveries captivated the world.
With evidence of a royal throne, Evans was certain
he'd found the palace of King Minos, the legendary ancient King of Crete.
The archaeologist named the civilisation Minoan after the King.
But some people began to make another connection.
Could this lost world actually be the inspiration for Atlantis,
the magnificent island city that had been devastated in Plato's story?
There are some very interesting parallels
between this place and Plato's Atlantis.
First of all, Knossos is on a huge, lush island.
That's a big tick.
And then Plato describes,
"a royal palace that befitted the greatness of the kingdom."
"|t was made up from buildings of many colours by blending the stones"
"for the sake of ornament."
Well, that could be describing this palace.
He also describes how sacred bulls were allowed to roam free
through the Palace of Atlantis,
and there's one thing you see plenty of here,
and that's images of bulls.
As Evans excavated,
he discovered images of bulls throughout the site.
Even wall paintings of Minoan people
leaping over the back of charging bulls.
And this was just the beginning.
As Evans and his team excavated over 14,000 square metres,
the parallels between Knossos and Plato's story of Atlantis
seemed to grow and grow.
Plato described that,
"the size and beauty of Atlantis was astonishing to see."...
...just like the enormous complex of grand buildings here.
In Plato's story,
the royal citadel in Atlantis is surrounded by mighty mountains,
just like Knossos,
and, as local expert Akrivi Chatzigeorgiou is showing me,
there was even more tantalising evidence of the similarities.
The gods of Atlantis were also present here.
I would like to show you something which is very interesting.
Look here.
What have we got here? That's like a... Oh, a trident!
Was the symbol of Poseidon.
It was used as an arrow, as a symbol showing which way to go.
OK, so like a signpost? Yeah.
Oh, well, let's follow it. Come on, let's go.
According to Plato, Poseidon was the main god on Atlantis.
He ruled the waves and made Atlantis a mighty sea power.
Plato tells us that,
"its vast harbour was crowded with merchant ships,"
"and there was a constant din of noise and shouting day and night."
In the heart of Knossos,
a magnificent building shows that the Minoans also dominated the seas.
This is a grand staircase,
one of the miracles of the Minoan architecture.
Cor! That is magnificent, and it's huge.
Yes. This is the big staircase, the grand staircase.
They made a deep cut to this side of the hill
in order to be able to construct two floors lower
on this level of where we are.
It was a big warehouse, a big economic centre.
So, it's a place of trade. Exactly.
Goods from all over the Eastern Mediterranean Sea
came in this building.
From Egypt, they imported cotton, wheat.
Copper was imported from the island of Cyprus.
The Greek name Kypros means copper. The island of copper.
Oh! Also, elephant tusks.
We found whole elephant tusks. Elephant tusks?
They are at the museum as well as gold from Nubia,
where the mines are of the Egyptian empire.
So North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean... Exactly.
...Southern Europe, all coming here? Yeah, exactly. This was a crossroad.
'The Minoans clearly had a vast trade network,
'just like the Atlanteans from Plato's story.'
And like Atlantis,
the archaeologists also began to realise this was a huge place.
They estimated that between 25,000 and 30,000 people lived here.
And by delving into Knossos's magnificent buildings,
it also became clear these people lived a life of luxury...
just like the inhabitants of Atlantis.
We know from the discoveries
that the upper classes loved the beautiful things.
Women were dressed with elaborated garments,
jewellery was worn by both, men as well as women.
They loved the wine. They loved good food.
So, lots of fish from the sea.
Exactly. We found seafood shells. We found fishing hooks.
So, they loved seafood.
So, if you had wealth, it was a good place to live. Exactly.
So, this was a rich, luxurious place,
there were magnificent buildings here, it was powerful-
it sounds so similar to the way that Plato writes about Atlantis.
The discoveries at Knossos had put Crete on the map,
and they'd also made Atlantis a hot topic.
On February 15th, 1909,
an anonymous article was published in the Times.
The title was simply Atlantis,
and it gives all sorts of detail
about the excavations here in Crete and the Atlantis story
and draws a direct connection between them.
It says... "|f the account of Atlantis"
"is to be compared with the history of Crete,"
"it seems almost certain that here, we have an echo of the Minoans."
And the Times said, "This may very well engage the serious attention"
"of scholars and archaeologists." And it was absolutely right.
Crete was now firmly in the spotlight to prove that
this really was the inspiration
for the legendary lost city of Atlantis.
Crete, the 1920s.
After two decades of digging,
the incredible palace of Knossos had been almost completely revealed
after lying buried beneath the soil for thousands of years.
The discovery had captivated the world
through its parallels with the story of Atlantis.
Now every inch of the island was scrutinised,
and everywhere you looked seemed to mirror the description of Atlantis
in the ancient tale.
You can see why people thought they were walking through Atlantis.
There's a tickle of a sea breeze coming off the ocean,
you can see the mountains over there in the background,
and everything seems to grow here, it's just so abundant.
Plato describes Atlantis like this.
He said that...
Reads a bit like a guidebook to Crete.
In his story of Atlantis,
Plato tells us that vineyards and olive groves flourished,
producing olive oil and wine for the enjoyment of its people.
Today, Crete is also a thriving olive oil and wine producer.
And there's evidence that's been this way for thousands of years.
This isolated little chapel is only around 100 years old,
but it's built on the foundations of something far older.
This is a remarkable and ancient wine press,
and the fields around here are still covered in vineyards to this day.
So, they've been pressing wine up here for generations.
It's unclear exactly how old this is.
Some people locally think it is Minoan -
that means the same era as the palace of Knossos.
But the wine making process is pretty straightforward.
You bring your grapes in here and people with nice clean feet
press the grapes, stand on top of them, jump on top of them,
and all of that liquid flows out into the surrounding tubs
through this hole here, for example.
And then that grape juice comes pouring out
in a huge torrent from here into this tub,
ready to be turned into wine.
Crete is believed to be the birthplace of Greek wine production,
made here on the island for around 5,500 years.
I'm visiting one of the region's modern vineyards to find out more
about Crete's wine-producing heritage
and why it links this island to the Atlantis story.
Let's start from the harvest.
The harvest here in Crete starts about August to September.
It's by hand.
So, you still pick the grapes with your hands?
There's no machine? Yeah, we still do it by hand.
We just use scissors. Yeah.
That's a tradition that's been going on for thousands of years.
Maybe they have not scissors.
Maybe they have another way to cut the grapes.
But this is the same.
Because the landscape with the hills and the small properties,
it's impossible to have harvest machines.
But of course, there are some parts of the wine making process
that have changed a little since the Minoans.
So, here, we have the press machine.
Now, this is different to what would have been done in the past
because this was all humans doing this in the past, right?
Exactly the same idea. But no electricity, just foot.
Footwork. Feet, just feet.
I don't think you want my feet anywhere near that.
So, I think this is a very good system.
Today, once the wine is pressed,
it is stored in these vast stainless steel vats
before it's bottled and shipped around the world.
At Knossos, 3,500 years ago,
they used enormous clay jars,
and there's evidence they also exported it far and wide.
Minoans were great exporters,
so from the ports, they went in Egypt,
in Lebanon, in Israel.
Especially in these countries,
we found a lot of paintings, especially in Egypt,
paintings with the appearances of vineyards
or jars or wine making and wine life.
So, Cretan wine is one of the big secrets of Minoan's success.
It's bringing them wealth through trade.
Exactly. So, they were making a lot of wine.
A lot of wine and brilliant wine. Of course, the best.
Ah.
The more I learn about Ancient Crete,
with its magnificent architecture
and its abundant fields producing all of nature's bounty,
the more I think it really could be inspiration for Plato's Atlantis.
In his story, Plato tells us
that Atlantis had close contact with Egypt,
just like the Ancient Minoans on Crete.
This link was yet another detail mirroring the Atlantis story.
And as those parallels grew and grew -
in the 1960s, one man became captivated.
He would become one of history's greatest Atlantis hunters.
His name was Spyridon Marinatos.
He was a local archaeologist and the curator of the museum in town.
He became obsessed.
He spent much of the rest of his career
trying to prove that this Minoan civilisation
was the basis for Plato's Atlantis,
a city that had been wiped off the map.
Marinatos had first visited Knossos
while archaeologists excavated in the 1920s.
He'd been blown away by their beautiful discoveries,
but he'd also been fascinated by something else they'd unearthed.
As the team excavated the palace,
they realised that it had been repaired,
changed at various points in its lifetime.
It had obviously been through quite a lot.
Like Atlantis,
the Minoan civilisation had vanished almost without trace
for thousands of years.
No-one knew why.
In the story, Atlantis had been the victim
of a terrible natural disaster.
But had a natural disaster also wiped out the civilisation here?
Marinatos was now on a mission to find out.
His investigations have been studied by Minoan expert Steve Kershaw.
I mean, what do you think happened here?
There's a palace here that's been inhabited for 450 years,
going through all sorts of different phases of destruction
and rebuilding and modification,
and some of those destructive events were natural,
the kind of things like earthquakes,
some of them may have been manmade as well.
And so, some of that could just be accidental fire? It could, indeed.
But Marinatos really wanted to get to the bottom of this,
and he's found traces of volcanic dust on the island,
so he thinks it's something volcanic,
but he doesn't think that the volcano is on Crete.
He thinks it's on a nearby island.
'Marinatos wanted to prove that a volcanic eruption
'from a nearby island had destroyed the Minoan civilisation here.
'And he had a very specific island in mind.
‘Santorini, which lies just 60 miles away...
'..and it's home to an enormous volcano.'
So, is Marinatos looking for this volcano solution a little bit
because of his obsession with the story of Atlantis?
It's very possible.
He knows that story, he likes that story.
and he, in a sense, wants that story to be true.
He wants this to be Atlantis. He really wants this to be Atlantis.
But there's also another reason why Marinatos was fascinated
by the possible link between Crete and nearby Santorini.
And that's because in his story of Atlantis,
Plato says that Atlantis wasn't just one island,
but made up of several islands.
He said that the royal centre was on Atlantis' main island,
but the docks and harbour were on another.
Could Santorini be one of the other islands mentioned in the story?
Marinatos was thrilled with this theory,
and he thought if he could prove it,
the link between the Minoans, Crete and Atlantis
would be stronger than ever.
Could it be that an enormous eruption out there on Santorini
had inspired the story of Atlantis?
In 1967, he set out on a hunt to find out.
Following Marinatos's search for Atlantis,
I'm now heading to the island of Santorini,
60 miles away across the sea.
Santorini is home to the biggest and most volatile volcano in the region.
If you look at these rock formations,
this whole island is basically one enormous volcano.
just 17 years before Marinatos arrived,
Santorini's volcano had erupted,
spewing ash and fireballs 1,000 metres into the sky.
In just six days,
90 billion tons of molten rock was thrown into the air.
What if an even more violent eruption had occurred
3,500 years before,
at the time when the Minoan civilisation
discovered on Crete reached its height?
That could mean that there was a city buried here beneath the rock.
A busy city with docks and harbours.
But where should Marinatos start his hunt for this lost port?
There are 42 miles of coastline on this island.
And that wasn't his only challenge.
It's a fairly daunting prospect
because that mighty volcanic eruption
had blasted millions of tons of volcanic debris into the sky,
but then fell, blanketing this island
in layer upon layer of pumice and rock and volcanic ash,
and you can see some of those layers etched out in this cliff face here.
So that meant that if there were any ancient ruins here,
the chances are they'd be under metres and metres of this stuff.
It must have seemed like Mission Impossible.
But little did Marinatos know, on the coast of Santorini,
he was about to make
the greatest archaeological discovery of his life.
The island of Santorini, 1967.
The hunt was on to find out
if a port city had been buried beneath the ground
following a gigantic volcanic eruption 3,500 years ago.
If they found it... it would help prove Spyridon Marinatos's theory
that this island and neighbouring Crete
could have been the inspiration for the story of Atlantis,
where a whole series of islands had been obliterated
by natural disaster.
He was on a mission to investigate...
and now he'd pinpointed an area to target.
'IO years ago,
an intriguing clue had been found buried near this spot,
under metres of ash.
In 1899, some labourers in a quarry just inland from here
started finding some mysterious objects.
They didn't know what they were, but they thought they looked ancient.
Marinatos was intrigued.
This was the perfect position for a port city - right on the coast.
So, gathering together a team, he started to investigate here.
He had no idea how deep they'd have to dig.
The volcanic ash and rock is 30 metres high
in some places on the island.
But remarkably,
on the very first day, they made a breakthrough.
They were digging through stuff just like this here,
and he was ecstatic when about four metres down,
he starts to make out the shape of pots,
and to his expert eye, they were clearly storage jars...
and storage jars that looked to be exactly the same type and date
as the ones he was so familiar with from Knossos in Crete.
But that was nothing because a few days later,
he would discover an entire buried city.
He called it Akrotiri.
WOW!
And these are the pots,
these are the storage jars
that he discovered so early on as he started digging.
And he didn't just discover one or two.
Look, there were three rooms full of them,
so different shapes and sizes,
different designs on the outside, maybe just to look nice and pretty,
but maybe to indicate that they were designed to store
different foodstuffs, some olive oil, some perhaps wine.
What a fantastic start to the excavation.
Over the next seven years, the archaeologists feverishly excavated.
Wall after wall...
room after room...
and building after building slowly began to appear
from beneath the 3,500-year-old ash and rubble.
And as they dug, they began to reveal striking similarities
with the story of Atlantis.
Located by the sea, it was almost certainly a port city.
And just like Atlantis, there was evidence
that its destruction had started with an earthquake.
This staircase here, look at that.
Finely crafted, strongly built stairs.
And yet, they've just been snapped in half in an instant
by the shockwave that the earthquake sent through this entire settlement.
Little did the survivors know after that earthquake,
as they tried to put their lives back in order,
there was worse to come.
Like Atlantis, a once thriving city had been obliterated.
Minoan expert Steve Kershaw is giving me
a guided tour of the ruins, to show me its past splendour.
Steve, I always love an archaeological site
where you look up at...
This was a multi-storey city, wasn't it?
It was indeed.
It's-It's now buried beneath metres and metres of volcanic debris.
So, it's all looking a bit grey now, but would it have been whitewashed,
would have been colourful inside and things?
It would, indeed, yes.
The exteriors would have been plastered over.
On the inside, you've got colourful frescoes and what have you.
Amongst the devastation are also details showing the true horror
that the people here experienced.
What on Earth are these?
Yeah, a couple of beds. The imprints of beds.
And what happened was,
before the eruption, there was an enormous earthquake,
and the people of the town were tidying it up.
So, they were stacking the beds, trying to tidy up,
maybe pick up loose bricks and things. Very much so.
And some of them are protecting bits of pottery as well,
you've got a little tripod cooking pot down there.
So, this is the repair work on the town
before the eruption that they never knew was coming.
What's happened is that
the wood has decayed in the volcanic material,
and the archaeologists have poured plaster into it
to recreate the bed out of the space.
So, the archaeologists found a vacuum, they poured plaster in,
it was a bed shape. Absolutely. Absolutely.
That's a moment in time, really,
captured from 3,500 years ago. Very much so.
It takes you right to the heart of people's real lives.
And that's one of the wonderful things
that archaeology can do for us, I think.
With its impressive multi-storey buildings,
Akrotiri had clearly been wealthy, just like Atlantis.
And as more and more of the ancient city surfaced from the ash,
the similarities grew even stronger.
So, what are we looking at here?
So, this is one of the main streets of the town,
and you've got houses on either side.
You can just see the remains of the walls.
Then a main street that would have been paved
with beautiful flagstones, and then the most remarkable thing,
I think, underneath it, you've got a drainage system.
What, that gutter there? That gutter, yes.
That humble gutter is actually a mark of extremely high civilisation.
Amazing! There's flushing lavatory systems,
and that would have all gone into that
and flushed it out into the sea.
That wasn't normal at the time, presumably?
No, that is highly sophisticated.
There's not many cultures have got that level of water engineering
in the states at this time.
And these people have got it down so well.
And that, I guess, allows everyone to live together in this crowded way
without getting terrible diseases. It's gonna help.
One of the reasons that people have drawn parallels
between here and Plato's Atlantis
is precisely this facility with water engineering,
because the Atlanteans are kind of the ultimate water engineers.
They create bathhouses with both cold and hot,
not just for their elite classes, but for the rest of the population,
and indeed not just for the human population,
but for the horses, the beasts of burden, and the animals.
So, we have cleanliness pervading Atlantis.
So, in Plato's Atlantis, even the animals are clean.
They are. So, for Plato and the Ancient Greeks, water management,
that said you're an advanced civilisation?
It does indeed, yeah. And they're doing it here.
They're doing it right here. Brilliant.
After digging up Akrotiri,
Marinatos was now convinced that his theory was right.
The combination of Knossos Palace on Crete
and this port city was inspiration for Atlantis.
It was like Atlantis itself had been found in stone.
You no longer had to imagine it.
You could walk through the streets,
could almost sense the people that had once lived here.
Today, many of Akrotiri's finest treasures
lie in Santorini Archaeological Museum in the town of Thera.
Each one gives a fascinating insight
into that lost world
and the parallels with the story of Atlantis.
I love these murals.
This was painted onto the wall
of one of the grandest houses in Akrotiri,
and it's such a special thing to have an image of their world
painted by the people who actually lived in it.
just look at this wonderful island here. It's lush.
You've got fantastic details like trees, deer,
perhaps a lion up there.
And then my favourite bit, this armada of ships and boats
heading out across the sea, some of them under oar,
some of them sail-powered.
Some of them look ceremonial
like it's almost a kind of festival experience.
Dolphins all around them, and they're arriving
in somewhere that I think looks quite like Santorini,
barren red cliffs, a sense of the volcanic, coloured buildings,
people greeting them.
This is a wealthy maritime world, a lot of colour and vibrancy.
Could this settlement at the end here actually be Akrotiri?
Was this what it looked like before it was destroyed in that volcano?
The whole thing that really strikes me when you look at this -
you look at the animals, the richness of the colours,
the buildings, the ships -
if you did want a picture of Plato's Atlantis, this is pretty much it.
Many of Akrotiri's buildings were covered
with beautiful frescoes that incredibly survived the disaster.
Each and every one seems to strengthen
the connection with Atlantis.
There are fishermen proudly holding their catch,
linking the Minoans to the sea,
just like the Atlanteans in the story.
Like Atlantis and Crete,
Akrotiri was clearly a rich and luxurious place.
We can see that from their hairstyles,
their fashions, their jewellery.
There are exotic animals native to Africa,
and in Atlantis, Plato mentions elephants.
The more I read about Atlantis
and the more I explore the wonderful archaeology on these islands,
the more I get a real sense of why people got so excited
about the apparent similarities
between the Minoans and the story of Atlantis.
Marinatos had discovered that, like the Atlanteans,
who ruled over several islands,
the real-life Minoans flourished both here and on Crete.
The Minoans, too, were clearly a massive sea power
with connections as far away as Egypt.
And they suffered an epic natural disaster.
The idea that these places were the inspiration
for Plato's Atlantis is compelling.
The problem I have with it is that it took place
over 1,000 years before Plato was writing,
and we've got absolutely no evidence that Plato had ever heard about it.
In fact, there is no account,
no mention of the destruction of Akrotiri
in any ancient source at all.
Possibly, we've lost those sources over the years,
and possibly, it was such an enormous event
that it was just talked about,
handed down from parent to child over the generations.
So, despite all the incredible similarities with Atlantis,
I'm gonna continue my search.
And luckily, there is another contender.
Through an incredible piece of detective work,
archaeologists have just discovered another lost city
on the coast of mainland Greece.
Perhaps the inspiration for Atlantis lies closer
to Plato's home of Athens and much closer to Plato's time.
The archaeologists discovered that not only was this city destroyed,
but that destruction was big news in Greece during Plato's lifetime.
Could this city be the real Atlantis?
Greece, nearly 2,500 years ago.
News of a terrible natural disaster reached the city of Athens.
About 100 miles away along the coast,
a huge tsunami smashed into the shoreline.
A once bustling, vibrant port now lay beneath the waves.
The devastated city was called Helike,
and intriguingly, its destruction occurred
just 13 years before Plato wrote about Atlantis.
There are some very interesting parallels.
For example, people in Greece at the time
said that the population of Helike
must have somehow enraged the sea god Poseidon,
and he was the one who destroyed the town.
Well, in the same way,
Plato's Atlantis is smashed by a vengeful god.
It's an interesting coincidence.
And just like Atlantis, Poseidon was the chief god of Helike.
The city was famously home to one of his most important temples.
So, this vanished city,
destroyed by a tsunami in Plato's lifetime,
certainly seems a good candidate as the inspiration for Atlantis.
The problem was that
for centuries, it was impossible to explore the connection
because Helike had vanished without a trace.
Apart from a few ancient stories,
there was no evidence that the city had ever existed at all.
But just 35 years ago,
archaeologists began to hunt,
and all that would change.
Their search would turn out to be
one of the most brilliant pieces of archaeological detective work
I have ever come across.
I'm just heading up the coast now,
following the footsteps of those brilliant archaeologists,
and I cannot wait to see what they uncovered.
At first, the archaeologists only had a very rough idea
where to look for the city of Helike -
100 miles west of Athens on the coast.
Once they arrived, they began to scour
every inch of the seabed around the shore
using sonar equipment, hunting for the city.
After three years, they had found...
...absolutely nothing.
Not one ruined building, not one piece of pottery.
But they didn't give up hope.
Instead, they did something surprising.
They began to look inland.
Now, that might sound like they're swapping their search
from a drop in the ocean to a needle in a haystack,
but the archaeologists had a theory.
What if the old coastline was actually inland
from where the modern beach is?
That would mean Helike wasn't underwater -
it was underground.
The archaeologists began looking back at the ancient stories to see
if there could be anything in this theory.
They concluded that in their previous hunts,
something had been lost in translation.
Helike wasn't buried under the sea,
but lost under an inland lagoon.
And they had some useful clues.
The ancient records named a few places
which archaeologists hope might help them pinpoint its location.
I'm a mile or two in from the coast now,
and apparently, one of the key landmarks was hidden
in these cliffs above me now.
One of the stories referred to a magical cave
high up in the mountains.
This was the Cave of Heracles.
You may known him by his Roman name, Hercules.
He's the half man, half god who performed the 12 Labours.
Well, the Ancient Greeks would climb up to the cave,
they'd kneel down before a statue of Heracles
just in there. They'd roll some dice,
and the statue would apparently tell their fortunes for them.
It still feels like a bit of an adventure coming up here today.
But more recently, this cave was also
the vital piece of evidence
that helped archaeologists fix
the position of the ancient city of Helike.
In ancient times, a geographer visited here
and, significantly, wrote down a detailed description of the area.
He mentions this cave. He mentions the ruins of Helike,
which you can still see in the shallows,
and he mentions the town of Aigio, which is still in existence today.
And that allowed archaeologists to piece together
what this coastline might have looked like 2,500 years ago.
Here's the coast. Here's the sea.
We know he mentions the cave here,
and he mentions the town of Aigio,
still in existence on the coast today.
Now, he says that Aigio was four and a half miles
from the ruins of Helike,
and he says that the cave was three miles from the ruins of Helike,
which means Helike should be round about here.
X marks the spot.
That is where they need to start looking.
Of course, they had to hope that
the ancient geographer was accurate...
...but it was a strong clue.
By 2000, the archaeologists had narrowed down their target.
That was still a huge area to investigate.
Well, you don't have to be an expert to work out
that you can't possibly just turn up here
and dig up such a vast area of this landscape.
They wouldn't just be scratching the surface, either.
They were pretty sure that after 2,500 years,
any remains would be buried deep underground.
They were gonna need to come up with a clever plan.
The archaeologist leading the hunt for the lost city
was Dora Katsonopoulou.
So, you and your team, you think you've identified the general area,
how do you find the exact sites? What's next?
There is nothing visible from Helike on the surface.
Everything is buried.
So, the only way to start getting some good information
about what is underground is the borehole drilling.
Drilling big holes straight vertically down
into the ground? Very small.
Something like that. OK.
So, small holes... A very small hole.
Drill them into the ground.
Drill into the ground. What are you hoping to find?
If we would be lucky, a few small pieces of pottery or tiles
that would show you an ancient occupation,
so you knew where the area is. How many boreholes did you drill?
A total of 99 in the plains.
99? Mm-hm.
You were drilling 99 holes in the ground.
Did you ever think, "|'m gonna give up, go back to Athens."?
No, no, never.
You always believed it'd be down there?
I am very persistent.
I was determined to find it.
And then in the year 1993, we found the first piece of pottery
and a few small, tiny pieces.
This led us to the first areas where we decided
that here we have something.
- So, let's dig. - So, let's dig!
For 2,500 years, the city of Helike had been lost.
Now it was on the verge of being found.
But could this discovery finally end the search
for the lost city of Atlantis?
January, 2000.
On the Greek coast, 100 miles west of Athens,
the atmosphere was buzzing.
After decades of searching,
archaeologists had finally targeted
a location for the lost city of Helike.
They'd always wondered whether Helike was inspiration for Atlantis.
Now, at last... they had a chance to find out.
It wasn't the easiest place to dig.
As you can see, the countryside is packed with dense olive groves.
And once they'd cleared these trees away, they dug into the ground
and found water quite close to the surface.
The water was very high.
All of it just made digging a difficult process.
They nervously dug through the waterlogged soil,
and it gradually became clear that something was buried here
beneath the ground.
Little by little, stone blocks emerged,
forming the outline of walls.
Pebbled floors slowly came into view.
And there were enormous storage jars dotted across the site.
They realised that,
amazingly, the lost city of Helike had been beautifully preserved
beneath the soil after thousands of years.
So, Dora, what are we looking at here?
We are walking through a major building complex.
Here was a thriving industry of textiles.
They were making textiles,
they were selling textile,
Lots of products going in and out.
Lots of coins found here,
showing exchange with many cities around Greece.
A very, a very rich place.
This ancient factory is just one of the many pockets
that have been found so far.
And the parallels with Atlantis are already proving to be strong.
A recent dig uncovered what appears to be the sanctuary of Poseidon,
the sea God worshipped both here and in Atlantis.
The evidence already shows that over 2,000 years,
this city grew to be huge, rich and powerful,
just like Atlantis.
And the evidence also suggests
that this once glorious place was destroyed in exactly the same way
as Plato's Atlantis, starting with a massive earthquake.
About 600 metres east from this building,
we have found in one of our excavations
the ruins of a classical building
that was destroyed by this earthquake of 373 BC,
and actually, the way the walls are destroyed
shows that there we have a tsunami action.
Wow. So, you can tell from the archaeology
that the buildings were knocked over by a tsunami?
Yes, exactly. Wow!
Atlantis and Helike had shared exactly the same fate.
And as evidence surfaced from beneath the ground,
Dora dug further into the ancient records about Helike
where she discovered another incredible connection.
just like Atlantis in Plato's story, Helike had been a bustling port.
On the night of the catastrophe,
it was harbouring a whole fleet of Spartan warships.
Extraordinarily,
the admiral of this fleet was Plato's most bitter enemy.
We found by looking again into the ancient sources
that Plato had also a personal interest in the Helike destruction.
Plato was travelling a lot,
and in one of his travels, he was captured.
- Wow! - And so the person tried to sell Plato into slavery.
- What? - Yeah, slavery.
And here in Helike, the night of the earthquake,
there were anchored here in Helike's port Spartan, ten Spartan ships.
Their admiral was called Potts.
This Spartan admiral was the person
that years ago had tried to sell him into slavery,
and he got drowned here.
- No. - Oh, yes.
So, we know this destruction would have a big impact personally...
- Yes. - ..on Plato?
- On Plato, yes. - CooL
Out of all the places I visited on my hunt for Atlantis,
Helike really does seem to tick the boxes
as a real candidate for the inspiration for Plato's story.
The destruction of Helike didn't just occur within Plato's lifetime,
but it had killed off his arch enemy.
I really love the way that Dora and her team combined
a close reading of the ancient texts with clever digging techniques
to make some astonishing discoveries.
It really emphasises to me that you can find something as remarkable
as a lost Atlantis if you ignore the fantasies
and just follow where the evidence leads.
Having visited the extraordinary sites
on the islands of Crete and Santorini...
dived to the sunken town of Pavlopetri
and seen buried Helike,
it does often feel as if you're in the lost world of Atlantis,
described by the ancient philosopher.
I would love to go back to the Agora here in Plato's time
and grab him by the shoulders and ask him what his inspirations were.
Was it Helike, Akrotiri or Crete
or one of the other places I've been to,
or was it all just a product of his own imagination?
In my mind, when Plato was conjuring up his fabulous story of Atlantis
with its glittering palaces, bustling ports,
and its terrible destruction,
the chances are that he was picking and mixing
from all the extraordinary places that I've seen.
And would he be amazed to discover that 2,500 years later,
people are still fascinated by the Atlantis story?
It's contributed to archaeologists making remarkable discoveries.
And will that interest in Atlantis continue
and will it drive us to discover
yet more ancient ruins beneath the waves?