Akrotiri

A Bronze Age town on Santorini buried by the Theran eruption in the sixteenth century BCE, radiocarbon most probably between 1620 and 1530, and preserved by the ash the way Vesuvius preserved Pompeii: frescoes, pottery, furniture, wooden objects recorded as voids in the ash. The difference from Pompeii is the thing that stays with you. No uninterred human remains have been found. Nobody died in the street. They saw it coming, organised, and left, and where they went is not known. Occupation on the site goes back to about 5000 BCE and the town was already large and trading across the Aegean by the end of the third millennium. The eruption and the drowned town are also the strongest real-world candidate anyone has offered for the story Plato told about Atlantis.