🥉 Eleni Iakovaki took World U20 bronze and broke the national record doing it, at an age when most people are still figuring out what they're good at.

🥈 Silver at the World Youth Championship for Chiotis and Alexiou, who did their country proud in front of a home audience of not nearly enough people.

🌋 Santorini is celebrating its volcano with a festival, undeterred by a new study giving that same volcano a 25% chance of waking up this decade. When in doubt, throw a party right on the fault line.

🥇 Tentoglou is through to the European final, continuing his mission to make Greeks briefly care very much about the long jump again.

🏖️ Greece is ramping up beach inspections to protect public access, taking on the sunbeds, the umbrellas, and the sacred Greek right to sit on the sand without renting a chair.

📦 Greek exports are set for a record, which is the kind of good economic news that never trends because it isn't a crisis.

📖 A Cypriot Australian writer earned finalist honors, a strong result for anyone who has ever turned two homelands and many complicated dinner stories into prose.

🍲 Adelaide threw a whole festival around fasolada, which tells you everything about the diaspora's genius for turning fasolada into a reason to party.

🚀 THI Canada and Ergo Capital are co-hosting Accelerate Greece 2026, connecting diaspora money with Greek startups, which is the good version of the diaspora getting involved.

💌 Send it to [email protected] - your question might become next week's featured Q&A.

Before Santorini was blue domes, honeymoon photos and $30 cocktails, it was a single round island called Thera and around 1600 BC, it exploded.

It was not a small eruption. It was one of the biggest in human history, up there with Krakatoa, violent enough to blow the entire middle out of the island and drop it into the sea. That dreamy caldera view, the one on every poster and every proposal, is the crater. You paid a premium to stand on the rim of the blast.

The eruption also buried a city, which somehow never makes it into the tour. Down on the south coast is Akrotiri, a Bronze Age town sealed under sixty meters of ash. Basically Pompeii, except this happened fifteen hundred years earlier. And what they dug out was no crude little settlement. Three-story houses, paved streets, hot and cold running water, and walls painted with frescoes so alive they still stop you, boys boxing, blue monkeys, a whole fleet of ships mid-voyage. These were rich, worldly people, part of the Minoan trading empire that ran the Aegean from Crete. The ash and the tsunamis this eruption threw at Crete are widely blamed for breaking that civilization for good. One of the first great cultures in Europe, undone by the volcano next door.

The most interesting part (or at least one of them) is that at Pompeii they found the dead everywhere, hundreds of them, curled up exactly where the ash caught them. At Akrotiri they found almost no one. Empty streets, emptied storage jars, valuables gone, furniture gone, whole households packed up and carried off. The people of Akrotiri felt the earthquakes coming, understood what those tremors meant, and got in their boats and left before the sky came down.

Which the Volcano Festival might want to sit with this year, because the volcano that did all this is not dead. It still grumbles and shifts, but it is quiet. And the latest study puts the odds of it stirring again inside the next decade at around one in four.

🎎 August 25 - September 4, 2026, The Chios Festival, Chios

🌋 September 19, 2026, Santorini Volcano Festival, Santorini

🗿 August 8 - 18, 2026, “Ladies of Kea”, Kea (Tzia) island

You've seen Santorini before you ever land there. The blue domes, the white cliffs, the sunset over the caldera. It's real, and it's genuinely stunning, and by six in the evening in Oia it's also a slow shuffle of a few thousand people all raising their phones at the same church. If that's the trip you came for, go, have it, no judgment. But there's a second Santorini almost nobody bothers with, and it's hiding about a ten-minute drive behind the famous one.

Step back from the rim and the island flattens out into something quieter. Vineyards on black volcanic soil. Old villages the tour buses never bother turning into. Pyrgos is the one to start with, a medieval village stacked in rings up a hill around a Venetian castle, all narrow lanes and small churches, with a view of the entire island and almost none of the crowd that comes with it. Emporio has the biggest medieval quarter on Santorini and the worn, comfortable feel of a place where people live rather than pose. Megalochori is a knot of whitewashed lanes and bell towers where you can wander in high-season July and genuinely not bump into another tourist. None of this is a secret. It's just far enough from the caldera to lose anyone who won't rent a car, which happens to be most people who come.

And then there's the wine, which is really the whole reason to come inland. Santorini's vines don't climb. They're coiled into low baskets on the ground, wound tight to survive the wind and catch what little moisture blows in off the sea, a trick the growers here have used for thousands of years and almost nobody else on earth copies. Out of that black soil comes Assyrtiko, a white so sharp and mineral it practically tastes like the island looks. The wineries sit right out among the vines, most of them with the same caldera view the crowds are fighting over in Oia, minus the fight. Do a tasting, then run it into the Akrotiri site from this week's gem, and you've built a whole day on the part of the island everyone else skips on their way to a photograph. The rim is the postcard but inland is where the place actually lives.

🍷 The inland wineries — Santo, Venetsanos, and the rest sit among the vines with the view and a fraction of the crowd. Start with the Assyrtiko, finish with the Vinsanto.

🏰 Pyrgos at golden hour — Climb to the old Venetian castle at the top. The whole island opens up, and there's no line to see it.

🏛️ Akrotiri, early or late — The Minoan Pompeii from this week's gem. Go first thing or near closing to walk the ancient streets nearly alone.

🍽️ Emporio's kasteli — Get lost in the medieval core and eat where the menu isn't printed in four languages.

Order fava on Santorini and you get a warm, silky purée of yellow split peas, usually drowned in olive oil and topped with onion and capers and not a fava bean in sight. The name is confusing only if you arrive with English expectations, which Greece has never agreed to honor. Santorini fava has PDO protection, grows in the island’s volcanic soil, and has been around long enough to make most “ancient grain” marketing look adorable. Spread it on bread, argue about the name, order more.

🇬🇷 Santorini's beaches come in colors, because a volcano did the interior design. Red Beach sits under rust-colored cliffs of oxidized lava. Perissa and Kamari are long stretches of black volcanic sand that will cook your feet by noon and should not be walked on barefoot at 2pm under any circumstances. There's even a White Beach, pale cliffs tumbling into the sea. Several thousand years of eruptions sorting the whole island by color and the postcard-blue water is the only thing that stayed normal.

That’s it for now. The volcano built the view, buried a city, and might not be finished, which makes it the most Greek thing on the island: dramatic, ancient, and impossible to fully relax around. Go inland, drink the wine, and keep one eye on the caldera.

Catch you next week for more news, drama and deep dives. 🧿 Stay Greek. [email protected]