Around four thousand years ago, a great Bronze Age civilisation grew up around the Mediterranean island of Crete. To its north was the island of Thera, now know as Santorini.

In 1625 BCE, Thera experienced one of the greatest volcanic eruptions in human history.

The island and its prosperous harbour town, which had traded luxury goods and raw materials as far as Egypt, Cyprus, the mainland of Greece, and Minoan Crete, were completely covered by metres of lava, ash and pumice. It was a dead and forgotten place for several centuries, and even when people began to resettle, the original inhabitants and civilisation were forgotten except in strange myths of Atlantis.

Three thousand years later, archaeologists began to dig through the layers of ash and eventually discovered a sophisticated town of two- and three-storey houses, painted with elaborate frescoes. It seemed that catastrophic earthquakes had heralded the final eruption: the people fled; they had time to bury their dead and remove their valuables. There are many different theories on where they went and what happened in that time; for this story I’ve chosen what makes sense to me.

The more I studied this civilisation, the more intrigued I became by one of the frescoes – a painting of girls in ceremonial dress picking crocus on a mountain. The girls are so individual that I became convinced they were portraits of real people. There’s no doubt that they would have been from the most privileged class – and yet, if they survived to flee the volcano, they would have had to start their lives again as refugees. This is how I imagined the story of one of the girls in that fresco – the snub-nosed saffron gatherer.