Fifty-five years separate today’s Santorini, one of the world’s most recognisable and distinctive tourist destinations, from a small black-and-white publication that appeared in 1971 under the simple title Santorini Guide.
Its pages capture a very different era — a Santorini that had only just begun to attract travellers, long before the caldera, Fira, Oia and the island’s extraordinary landscape became images recognised around the world.
Today, millions of people know Santorini even if they have never visited. Its unique natural landscape, architecture, villages, wines and local products have created a tourism identity with global reach.
Behind today’s image, however, lies a transformation that unfolded over decades. It began when the island had very limited tourist infrastructure and visitors arrived to discover a place that remained largely unknown.
The 55-year-old guide therefore offers a window into that earlier Santorini.
Santorini in 1971 through the pages of its own guide
Petros Delendas published the Santorini Guide in 1971. He had strong ties to the island and belonged to a generation that recognised early on the potential to promote Santorini and its products.
In a section titled “Today’s Santorini”, Delendas provided travellers with practical information. Reading it today feels like opening a window onto another world.
On accommodation, he wrote: “Santorini today has approximately 75 beds.”
His description of access by sea also illustrates how different the island was:
“It has no port, nor is it easy to acquire one, because of the great depth of its waters to the west, and to the east because of sedimentation.”
Even the availability of water reflected a completely different way of life.
“It has neither lakes nor rivers, but when the winters are rainy there is an abundance of water.”
The guide added:
“Only at the location ‘Zoodochos’, where the chapel of the same name also stands, is there running water.”
Residents collected rainwater in cisterns, making it a precious resource for household needs.
The guide also reveals just how modest the island’s tourist infrastructure remained. Accommodation and dining options were limited, while it identified Kamari and Perissa as the main beaches for swimming.
This was decades before the beaches developed their modern tourist infrastructure and before Santorini’s cuisine became one of the strongest elements of its international tourism identity.
The guide’s references to restaurants and accommodation have particular value today because they document the beginnings of a tourism economy that would transform the island in the decades that followed.
The holiday experience itself was entirely different. Travellers did not arrive at a destination organised around their needs. They explored the villages and beaches and adapted to the island’s daily rhythm.
And this was not centuries ago. It was 1971.
A small social portrait of the island
The guide goes beyond the information tourists needed. It records schools, institutions, services and aspects of everyday life, giving it the value of a small social document.
It mentions, among other facilities, an old people’s home, a clinic and a boarding school, while also recording schools operating in several settlements.
Its references to foreign consular authorities are particularly interesting. In earlier periods, consular agencies representing Austria-Hungary, Britain, Italy and Germany operated on Santorini. By the time the guide appeared, only the French consular agency remained.
The publication also captures an economy in which agriculture, viticulture and local production still played central roles.
Tourism had begun to emerge, but it had not yet transformed the island’s entire character.
And this is where the guide’s story meets the personal history of the man who published it.
The man behind the guide
Petros Delendas’ story reflects an era when people returned to their ancestral homes and sought, in their own ways, to contribute to their development.
His niece, Margareta Delenda-Lidoriki, left a vivid account of him in the bilingual photographic book Santorini as Seen on Postcards up to 1956 – Santorini Until 1956 Through Cartes-Postales, published by the Archive of Theraic Studies – Dimitris Tsitouras Collection.
The book documents an earlier Santorini through 330 authentic postcards from Dimitris Tsitouras’ collection, together with photographs and postcards that travelled around the world and depicted the island up to 1956.
Writing about her uncle, Delenda-Lidoriki recalled:
“I always remember my father’s brother, ‘Uncle Petros’, with love. A cheerful, lively, charming man full of humour.”
She described him as a “bachelor by conviction, a bohemian”, someone welcomed everywhere because, as she wrote, “his exuberant presence and good humour captivated not only his friends but also everyone fortunate enough to meet him.”
Delendas worked for many years for the English Telecommunications Company, later OTE, before making a major decision.
He sought early retirement so he could settle permanently, as his niece wrote, “on the island of his ancestors, his beloved Santorini.”
There, he served as the French Consul, became involved in local affairs and developed an activity that, in modern terms, could be described as an early organised tourism-promotion effort.
Fava, wine and capers for the first tourists
One of his most important initiatives, according to Margareta Lidoriki’s published account, involved establishing Santorini’s first organised showroom and retail outlet for packaged local products.
He presented visitors with fava, wine and capers — products now inseparably associated with Santorini and its international gastronomic identity.
At the time, however, Lidoriki wrote that these products remained “completely unknown to foreign tourists, but also to many Greeks.”
The initiative becomes even more significant when viewed against the reality described in the 1971 guide: an island with approximately 75 hotel beds and a tourism market still in its infancy.
Delendas did not simply wait for visitors to discover the island’s products. He packaged them, presented them and made them part of the travel experience.
According to Lidoriki’s account, he also printed the island’s first “modern” postcards in Italy. Until then, most postcards came from local photographer Ioakimidis, whose work, she noted, preserved valuable images of old Santorini.
The connection is particularly striking because Lidoriki’s account appears in a book dedicated to Santorini’s old postcards.
Small images that visitors once purchased and mailed abroad became one of the earliest ways the island’s image travelled beyond Greece.
Through different means, Delendas was effectively doing something that every major tourism destination considers essential today: creating an image of his home and sending it out into the world.
From showroom to family home
Part of this story still survives in Fira.
The space where Delendas once operated his showroom for Santorini products later became a family home. For more than three decades, generations of the family, relatives, friends and schoolmates passed through its doors.
It represented a different form of hospitality.
During the summers, the house filled with groups of people returning to the island, at a time when Santorini remained, for many families, a place of return and reunion rather than simply a tourist destination.
Directly opposite stands Agios Stylianos, the distinctive Catholic chapel built on the edge of the caldera. Today, visitors from around the world stop there to photograph one of Fira’s characteristic views.
The chapel dates back at least to 1757, when Catholic Archbishop of Naxos Petros De Stefani recorded it in a catalogue of Santorini.
The church has a cross-shaped, domed architectural form characteristic of Thera, and its history also connects with the Delendas family.
According to the plaque at its entrance, the church belonged to the family of Antonios Delendas, or Krinos. His descendant Flora, wife of Nikolaos G. Delendas, donated it in 1919 to priest Nikolaos F. Delendas, who left it to the Catholic Diocese of Thera in his will in 1929.
The church underwent repairs in 1988 and celebrates its feast day on November 26.
The story of the former showroom and family home continues today.
Amelot Art Suites now operates in the same space, offering accommodation while maintaining a connection with the building’s history.
Architects Katerina Vassiliadi, Fani Vournadaki and Kostas Antoniadis carefully adapted the property to its new use with minimal intervention, preserving as much of its distinctive character as possible.
A fascinating continuity has therefore emerged more than half a century later.
The same space where visitors once discovered Santorini’s fava, wine and capers later welcomed relatives, schoolmates and friends.
Today, the same doors open again to visitors from around the world.
The hospitality has become professional, but the space continues, in a different way, to serve the same fundamental purpose: welcoming people to the island.
Delendas Tower and “The Santorini Girl”
Petros Delendas’ activities extended beyond the tourism guide and the promotion of local products.
As Margareta Lidoriki wrote in Santorini Until 1956 Through Cartes-Postales, he transformed a complex of cave dwellings at Mesa Gialos according to his own designs into a striking and unusual architectural structure.
The building still dominates the area and has become known as Delendas Tower.
Delendas also wrote poetry, particularly satirical poems, which, according to Lidoriki’s account, the humorous radio programme hosted by Nina and Nikolakis often presented.
He also wrote the lyrics for the song “I Santoriniá” (“The Santorini Girl”), which composer Iosif Ritsiadis set to music. Delendas published the song as both sheet music and a vinyl record.
Fifty-five years after the publication of the small guide, Santorini has become a global tourism symbol.
Yet many of the elements that first made the island distinctive remain at the heart of its identity: its extraordinary volcanic landscape, distinctive architecture, local products, wines and people.
The little Santorini Guide from 1971 now stands as a record not only of how dramatically the island has changed, but of how far its image travelled in little more than half a century.
