The Late Cycladic town at Akrotiri, Thera, and the familiar architecture of a prosperous society

Clairy Palyvou, Professor Emerita of Architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Visiting Professor at Frederick University, examines the architecture and building technology of the Late Bronze Age town at Akrotiri on Thera. Given in Greek, the lecture draws on her decades as site architect at Akrotiri under Christos Doumas. Palyvou begins with the volcanic geology of Thera, the debate over the eruption date using North Pole ice-core data, and the history of exploration from Ferdinand Fouqué's 1860s work on Therasia during the Suez Canal pozzolana quarrying to Spyridon Marinatos's excavations from 1967, alongside her own fieldwork on Therasia with Iris Tzachili.

The core of the talk analyses how Akrotiri's builders adapted Minoan building technology to a seismic environment using volcanic stone, scarce clay and timber. Plaster casts of voids in the pumice preserve wooden furniture and structural frames. Palyvou walks through the town's compact blocks without courtyards, stepped facades, drainage network, and two- to three-storey houses. She details rubble walls reinforced with timber (including a diagonal corner brace), ashlar facades tapering in course height, thin upright mudbrick partitions on upper-floor beams, and timber frames supporting pier-and-door partitions (polythyra) and multi-window walls.

She then traces domestic circulation through the standardised entrance staircase, flat roofs, and the integration of wall paintings with window grids, concluding with a 3D reconstruction of the West House, its loom-weight room, service stair, and upper-floor lavatory connected to the street sewer. In the discussion afterwards, Vassos Karageorghis, Sophocles Hadjisavvas and other audience members ask about timber sources, wall thicknesses, dowel-and-mortise masonry, and whether timber-framed building techniques reached Kition via Ugarit.