The Americans Craig and Oliver went to Santorini for the first time in 2002 and when they ran out of books they realized that there wasn’t any bookstore on the island! So they had a crazy dream; to open their own bookstore in Oia. One and a half years later they managed to make their dream come true.
In 2014 the bookshop Atlantis Books will celebrate its 10th anniversary with a series of events, from a wedding to a Literature festival.
Craig Walzer has developed a series of creative projects to preserve the bookstore: the publishing series Paravion Press with 17 titles travel to bookstores in New York, London, Paris and others (www. paravionpress.org/shop), events on the terrace with the amazing view, while in 2011 he managed to collect 40,000 dollars through crowd funding.
Craig cannot read in Greek yet, but he loves Panos Karnezis, Odysseas Elytis and Yiannis Ritsos, while during the summer he was thrilled with Zisimos Lorentzatos’s book Diary, Rhodes.
Walzer admits that the life of a tourist on Santorini is very different from the life of a local. “Santorini is a beautiful place, but as a tourist, you do not experience the real Greece. It is a different experience to go through the winter, to enjoy the simplicity of the villages, to see the children of the island growing up…”
Since 2005, when the Guardian’s editor and a friend of Craig’s, placed Atlantis among the top 10 bookstores, Atlantis has been included in several lists.
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