Thera

{Quote|Sternhart's diary put it all together. Crete is the greater colony, Thera the lesser. Plato placed Atlantis seven and a half miles southeast of Thera. Thera (also called Santorini) is a Greek island in the Cyclades island group in the Aegean Sea, between the Greek mainland and Crete.

The ancient Minoan civilization had a colony on Thera, while their main land was the island of Crete to the south.

The lost island of Atlantis was located a few miles southeast of Thera. When Plato recorded information about Atlantis in his work, the Hermocrates, a mistranslation shifted the distance from Greece to Atlantis by a factor of ten. However Plato also referred to Atlantis' location as being southeast of the lesser colony.

In May 1939, Indiana Jones and Sophia Hapgood were on the track of Atlantis, racing against several competitors, including Klaus Kerner and Charles Sternhart. Catching up to a dying Sternhart in the ruins of Knossus, Jones learned that the lesser colony meant the Minoan colony of Thera. Jones contacted Niklos, who took him to the site over the undersea ruins of Atlantis off of Thera.

Behind the scenes
Thera was the site of the volcanic eruption that may have helped in the collapse of the Minoan civilization. The island was turned into a caldera and sank, becoming a ring of islands around an underwater crater. The discovery of Minoan ruins on the island in the 1960s led to theories hypothesizing it as the location of Plato's Atlantis, destroyed by the volcanic eruption.

In modern times, while Thera is the official name of the island, it is colloquially referred to as Santorini.

Appearances

 * Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
 * Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis comic