Mykonos Island
Mykonos and Delos
Ask anyone about Greek islands they know or have heard of, and the first likely name to come up is Mykonos. If you can shut your eyes to the human element and try to put your visual clock back some years, you can see why. The town rises in a natural amphithea¬tre around a picturesque harbour, a half-moon city that is in itself one of the most enchanting in the Aegean. Architecturally it presents a pure and dazzling example of the cubist Kykladic style, though to appreciate that you have to penetrate behind the garish line of bars and restaurants which have grown up around the wide quayside. The whitewashed, blue- or red-domed churches are still there, and the little back streets tumble happily into each other in shifting sun and shadow. Even now it has moments of enchantment, and you can see what a discovery it must have been and why so many visitors fell for it at first sight.
The trouble is that Mykonos is now all too accessible - by sea from Athens and from four large and popular neighbour islands, but most of all through its airport. During the summer several flights a day come in from Athens, every cruise liner disgorges passengers by the hundred, and day excursions pour in from any island within two or three hours sailing distance. The hotel and package holiday indus¬try has taken up the challenge, and the town has become a well organized machine for absorbing tourist money. For most of the day it is impossible to cross the promenade without dodging streams of people moving in every direction. Early morning is the best time; by evening the neon lights take over from the sun-lit white walls, and the bars and discos turn up the volume of their cacophony.
Yet behind all this, and to a certain extent because of it, there is a feeling abroad of a vigorous and multifarious life which still retains a good deal of Greek character. Certainly it is possible to eat well if you shun the front and find where Greeks eat in side street or back alley. There is no doubt that you can have a good time here, if that is the kind of time you want, and there are interesting things and places to see away from the crowds.
The convenient figure of 365 for the tally of churches on Mykonos
is probably too low. There must be nearer four hundred - both figures include the whole of the island. The first you see is little Agios Nikolaos, in the middle of the quay. Once he had an island to himself, reached by a causeway, but now the modern quay has expanded to include him. St Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, and he can be sure of a good position in any harbour. One of the strangest churches is on the headland beyond the outer mole, called the Paraportiani. The word Paraporti means a postern or private door, so that is probably how the church was reached from inside the harbour wall. It is an almost pyramidal group of four separate churches, and it would look like a mad confectioner’s dream were it not redeemed by the austerity of its steps and vertical lines. How often in the Aegean one finds the marriage of Byzantium and the classical world, and marvels that such a mingling of dogma and outlook has produced such fine offspring. Often in Mykonos one can find, where plaster and lime have peeled away, fragments or antique blocks of marble built into the houses, probably plundered from the ruined buildings of deserted Delos.
In a similar position on the opposite side of the harbour is the Archaeological Museum, an attractive place with an enclosed gar¬den. Most of the finds come from the cemeteries on Rhineia, the island on the far side of Delos where bodies were exported to beat the ban on death in the sacred island, but the proudest place is taken by a seventh-century pithos on the neck of which is carved in relief a spirited Trojan horse, with Odysseus and his companions peeping out of square openings in its sides. The horse has a knowing look, with its ears well cocked for trouble.
The most striking view of Mykonos town is not from the main harbour, but just round the point where the Paraportiani stands. Here the old balconied houses line up in a graceful crescent with their feet washed by the sea; those balconies must be damp in a westerly blow. Still further round are the three windmills which feature in almost every illustration. Actually there are five, but only three have been kept in good condition as one of the island’s chief attractions, and it is a very long time since their sails revolved to grind corn. The Kato Myli, as they are called, stand on a ridge between the Catholic cathedral and the church of Agios Charalambos. Built into the lintel of the main door of the Catholic cathedral are the arms of the Ghisi family, who held Mykonos from the partition of the Byzantine Em¬pire until their extinction in 1390, when it was bequeathed to the Venetian Republic. Like the other Kyklades it passed to Turkish
control in the sixteenth century, though Venice continued to claim it until it was formally ceded in 1718. One of the prettiest yet simplest corners is round the Tria Pigadia, the ‘three wells’, which also figure in many photographs. You come upon them well back in the town, beyond the largest plateia.
The tourist attractions of Mykonos include some very popular beaches. There is Agios Stephanos on the north side of Tourlos bay, and several on the long south-facing coast. The most accessible by road, and therefore the most crowded, is Platy Gialos, about three miles south of the town and served by frequent buses. Others, such as the appallingly named ‘Super Paradise’, can be reached by morning boat trips from the harbour, but far the best and quietest are at Kalaphatis, at the end of a roughish track down from the village of Ano Mera. There are some attractive apartments to let here (at a price) and a not so attractive hotel. They look across at a distinctive headland known officially as Cape Tarsana, but locally as ‘the breasts of Aphrodite’. The sandy beaches on either side look ready to wel¬come the goddess.
Ano Mera, though the largest village in the island, is an undistin¬guished place. It contains the rather dull convent of Tourliani which makes a great display of ecclesiastical vestments, embroidery and woodcarving, but the Moni Palaiokastrou just to the north of the village is well worth a visit even if you have to take a taxi there. There is no sign today of ancient fortifications, but once you step inside this little convent (there were just three nuns at the last count) you will find it a refuge from all the brashness and noise elsewhere. A shady paved courtyard slopes gently upwards to the church of the Panagia, passing the poor but cosy quarters where the sisters sit at their embroidery or sewing. Age has crept on, and at least one of them was wandering in her wits, but there must be peace and comfort for all here.
The Ormos Panormou is a good deep bay which cuts into the northern coast with a not easily reached beach, but the rest of the interior of Mykonos is uninspiring, with sporadic building spreading over the low scrubby hills. Only above Agios Stephanos can you climb over a thousand feet to the top of Mount Prophitis Ilias (there are two of them on this island) and enjoy a panorama of Mykonos and the surrounding islands. Delos and Rhineia lie to the south, and the bulk of Tinos fills the northern horizon. Ships and kaikis trail across the windy sea, and the Mykonos channel is usually scuttering with small white waves as the current pushes down from the north.
Finally, the Mykonos Pelican. It may be the original Petros you see here on the quay, once stolen by the Tiniots and awarded back to Mykonos in a famous lawsuit, but he has a very handsome rival in Tinos today — or is it the same bird commuting between the two islands for a large and fishy fee?
From Mykonos it is only five miles by boat to Delos, the heart of the Aegean. If one asks why this tiny wisp of ground, with no natural resources, ever became what it did, then the answer can be given by any sailor. Delos is the last and best anchorage between Europe and Asia. To the east it is sheltered by Mykonos, to the north by Tinos and to the west by Rhineia. Looking at the chart you can see how the direct sea route between the Gulf of Nauplia (with Argos at its head) and the principal harbours on the Asiatic coast flows directly along the latitude of 37° 10′, with Delos at the halfway mark. At the same time it is just about half way along the north-south trading route between the Dardanelles and Crete. Religious centres may some¬times attract trade, but more often one will find that where the trade is, there also come the temples.
It was the Ionians from the east who colonized the Kyklades in the tenth and ninth centuries BC, and they brought with them to Delos the cult of Leto, one of the many mistresses of Zeus, who gave birth to
both Artemis and Apollo. ‘Artemis’, according to Robert Graves, ‘originally an orgiastic goddess, had the lascivious quail as her sacred bird. Flocks of quail will have made Ortygia a resting place on their way north during the spring migration.’* He later identifies Ortygia with Rhineia, the deserted island close to the west coast of Delos, where Artemis was said to have been born before crossing with her mother to Delos to assist at the birth of Apollo. Quail still alight on Rhineia and Delos in spring, which makes the connection plausible.
It was the jealousy of Hera which led to Apollo and Artemis being born here. Pursued throughout the world by the angry goddess, Leto was carried on the wings of the wind until she found herself over Delos, the ‘wandering island’ as it was called because it had drifted through the Aegean since the dawn of time, waiting for the birth of the divine twins. Poseidon, in one of his rare fits of generosity, struck Delos with his trident and anchored it to the bed of the sea.
Leto gave birth to Apollo on Delos, below the north side of Mount Kynthos in the shade of a date palm - another sacred symbol of Artemis. Immediately the barren island was transformed, flowers and fruit burst from the rocks, the Bird of Dawning crowed his delight at the sun, and swans circled the sacred lake. Apollo’s worship was established here before the days of Homer, for Odysseus says to Nausicaa that he can only compare her beauty to ‘a young palm tree which I saw when I was in Delos, growing close to the altar of Apollo’.**
Coming to historic times, we find that in the seventh century BC Delos was an important Ionian religious centre protected by Naxos. The rising power of Athens was not long in seeing its equal impor¬tance as a trading centre. In 543 Pisistratus, dictator of Athens, puri¬fied the sanctuary of Apollo by digging up all the tombs in sight and removing the bones to another part of the island. A further and more elaborate purification followed in 426, when the elected Athenian leader Nikias removed all the burials on the island and ordained that it was never to be defiled by human birth or death. Anyone in danger of dying, or a woman nearing childbirth, was ferried across to Rhineia before the worst happened. Four years later all the remaining natives were expelled, presumably to leave Athens with a free hand on the island. The Persians granted them a refuge on the Ionian coast, but after an appeal to the Delphic oracle Athens had to allow them back.
The first period of prosperity for Delos was immediately after the Persian wars, when its position in the centre of the Aegean made it strategically and commercially important. In 478 the Athenians made it the base for their confederacy of Aegean and Ionian states, and a common treasury was established there to receive and bank the agreed contributions from the various cities and islands. It began as an alliance to consolidate their success against the Persians, but dur¬ing the next twenty years it became more and more openly the base for an Athenian empire, and in 454 the treasury was transferred to Athens itself.
However, the religious festival of the ‘Delia’, which had been celebrated since earliest times, was revived by Nikias in 426, perhaps in the hope that Apollo would spare Athens another outbreak of the plague which had decimated the city a few years before. In its new form the festival included games in the classical tradition, and even horse-racing was introduced. It took place in the third year of every Olympiad, and began when a convoy of ships set sail for the island, full of priests and sacred choirs, some also carrying oxen for the ritual slaughter. Leading the convoy was the sacred ship Theoris with the head of the Athenian delegation on board. Disembarking near the beginning of the Sacred Way, the priests, choirs and other principals went in procession to the Sanctuary of Apollo. Here hymns to Leto and her two children were sung, and after the sacrifices the games and competitions began. The stadium and gymnasium were built well away, about five hundred yards to the north-east, from the religious centre of events. The whole festival was something of a mixture of a pilgrimage to Lourdes, an Eisteddfod and an athletics
meeting.
These days the modern cruise liners anchor offshore and send their passengers in by small boat, but the day excursions still come directly into the sacred harbour, a little north of the ancient commer¬cial port. The latter is easy to recognize from the ruins of old ware¬houses, granaries and quays around its sides. The Sanctuary of Apollo lies inland from the modern jetty, a very big area in which the foundations of three temples have been found. The entrance was through a propylaea, and immediately on the right is the sixth-century House of the Naxians, divided into two aisles by a row of marble columns. Outside this is the base of the great statue of Apollo, an offering from Naxos and made of Naxian marble. Two fragments of the torso are preserved on the spot, while a part of the left hand and the toes of the left foot have found their way to the British
Museum. The archaic inscription on the base reads ‘I am of the same marble, statue and base’.
It needs an effort of the imagination to see the sanctuary as it was, with the giant bronze palm tree set up by Nikias in 417, the colossal figure of the god, and the treasuries of the cities rich in carving and gold. But Delos is one of those places where one feels the past very close.
Leaving the Sanctuary and walking a hundred yards or so to the north, we cross the large Agora of the Italians, with a rectangular peristyle of a hundred and twelve Doric columns, to reach the Sacred Lake, now dry and dusty under the sun. Against a sky of blinding blue its guardian lions lift their heads and roar. They are long-bodied, lean archaic lions, carved from Naxian marble in the seventh century, and they look to have a trace of panther in their ancestry. Only five of what are thought to have been sixteen are left; a sixth was taken away in the seventeenth century to guard the Arsenale in Venice. Mounted on a ridge of flinty tussocks they seem indifferent to the modern intruder.
Birth and death may not have been permitted on this sacred island, but the spring of life, the act of procreation itself, is celebrated. At the north-east corner of the main Sanctuary is the small Sanctuary of Dionysus. Here stood a row of choragic monuments crowned by marble phalluses (those surviving have been truncated) rising white and triumphant against the skyline. Around the base of one is carved a light-hearted scene of a bride being carried to her new husband’s home. Another has Dionysus himself with a dancing Bacchante in attendance - all joyful celebrations of wine and love-making.
Standing on its own to the east of the Sanctuary and Sacred Lake is the Delos Museum. The exhibits are a mixed lot, with the finest sculptures understandably removed to Athens. The oldest substantial object is an archaic marble sphinx from Naxos. Otherwise there is a lot to do with Dionysus - two kneeling satyrs wearing shorts made of ivy leaves, actors dressed as Silenus and a seated statue of the god. But the real wonders of Delos are outside - the broken marbles, the barley grass, the golden thistles, all charged with true Apollonian radiance.
The second great period of prosperity was during the Hellenistic age, from the third to the first century BC. Delos enjoyed virtual independence under Macedonian rule, and had special commercial privileges under the Romans. It was then that the residential quarter grew up around the theatre, with every appearance of wealth among
the inhabitants. It is very unlikely that the veto on births held good at this time, though for practical reasons the bodies of the dead would have been carried across the straits to Rhineia. During the same period the commercial harbour was enlarged and developed as some¬thing akin to a free port for trade between east and west. A more notorious function of the port area was as the biggest slave market in Greece. Strabo, the first century historian and geographer, tells us that as many as ten thousand slaves were bought and sold there in a day.
The end came suddenly. In 88 BC Delos was attacked by the forces of Rome’s chief Asiatic enemy, King Mithridates of Pontus. They massacred the male population, enslaved the women and children, looted the sanctuary and the warehouses, and destroyed the city. Although Sulla recaptured the island in the following year, it never recovered its wealth or position, and by the second century AD Pausanias found it almost uninhabited.
The Theatre was built in the early third century BC for over five thousand spectators, but only the lower tiers of seats survive. The orchestra has been restored and a study by the French School has made it possible to reassemble the stonework of parts of the scena and proscenium, but to get the feeling of an audience you must climb to where the top seats were - the ‘Gods’ - and look down over Rhineia to the sea beyond, where the sun sets in evening glory. The Theatre Quarter was thickly populated in Hellenistic times, and here some of the finest private houses were built.
In the heart of it is the House of Dionysus, with part of a pave¬ment in the courtyard showing the god with wings and riding a (striped) tiger. Above the theatre to the south-east he appears again in the House of the Masks, this time more fully preserved and riding a (spotted) panther. Here he has no wings, but he holds a tambourine in his left hand and the thyrsos in his right. Another pavement in the same house has designs of comic and satyric masks, and it seems to have been used as a sort of green room club, or a hostel for perform¬ers. Beyond that again is the House of the Dolphins, where the atrium has a pavement with an exquisite circular design within a square whose corners are filled by pairs of dolphins in harness, ridden by a tiny winged figure - maybe Eros, maybe a mini-Hermes. The craftsmanship is remarkable, considering how intractable the mosaic medium must have been for such a delicately designed sub¬ject. The artist signed the work, and it is believed to have come from a studio in Beirut. Another fine set of mosaics is in the House of the
Trident, back in the centre of the quarter. It has some intricate geometric motifs and yet more dolphins curling themselves round ships’ anchors. The trident is a most elegant affair, with a ribbon tied nonchalantly round the shaft.
The visitor today has been well served both by the archaeologist and by the custodians of Delos. The huge complex of buildings, sacred and secular, adding up to no less than a great city, can be surveyed and taken in without too much difficulty with the help of an excellent booklet on sale at the entrance. Restorations are clean and clear, buildings are identified on the site, marble columns and bright mosaic floors gleam in the sunshine. With no mediaeval or modern accretions to distract the eye, you can recapture a great deal of the atmosphere of its heyday - perhaps one of the most gracious periods in the history of the eastern Mediterranean.
The best preserved temples are also of this period, to be found in the area known as the Sanctuaries of Foreign Gods on the way up to Mount Kynthos. Many of these deities were Egyptian - Serapis, Isis and their like - though the most impressive building here was devoted to the Syrian goddess Atargates and her consort Hadad (an eastern equivalent of Demeter and Hermes) which included a small theatre with seating for four or five hundred people to watch the ceremonies. The Hellenistic age liked a touch of the exotic and mystical in its observances, and sure enough we find a Samothrakion where the Kabeiroi and the Great Gods of Samothrace were given their expected rites.
Through this area ran the stream of Inopus, which fed a number of cisterns, some for secular use, some for purificatory rites and some as a home for sacred fish or reptiles. Today they still hold water, and especially at sunset and in the cool hours which follow you can hear the bull-frogs begin to croak - the classic ‘brekekekek-koax-koax’ realized by the chorus in The Frogs of Aristophanes. Echoing out of the stagnant water, the yellowing weeds and the hollow places where houses and temples stood, their voices survive.
A silent survivor, except for the quick dry rustle as he slips behind a rock, is the Delian lizard. His only equals for size are to be found in Rhodes and Kos, and if any creature is a prehistoric survival this is it. They may belong to the family varanidae, or ‘monitor lizards’, in which case they are likely to have been imported originally from north Africa. They confront you with a cold stare at the windings of the pathways, and not until you are right on top of them do they give a wag of their fat tails and move off into the scrub. The statue of
Apollo Sauroktonos (the ‘lizard-slayer’) by Pheidias has a large liz¬ard climbing the tree on which the god is leaning. Is this the ‘old dragon’ which Christian saints later confronted? Whatever the mes¬sage, Delos is an island where the sun and the lizard seem both more potent than anywhere else.
Whenever you come to Delos, do not for anything miss the Cave or Grotto on the north side of the mountain just below the peak. From above it is invisible; you reach it by taking a path to the right before you begin to climb the last long flight of steps. A natural fault in the rock has been turned into a holy place by wedging great slabs of stone together to form a crudely arched roof - the architectural fore-runner perhaps of the triangular weight-bearing slabs of Myce¬nae.
Ignore the large round marble column base by the entrance, and look inside. Right at the back of this cavern stands a lump of rock with a flat upper surface stained a dark reddish brown, and when the sun climbs over the mountain behind you will see that the light strikes it through the gap between the roof and the rear wall. Argue as modern scholars may that this was only a Hellenistic shrine of Herakles, the visitor with imagination is invited to believe that it is an ancient rock temple, older perhaps than anything on Delos. Neither Apollo nor Artemis were strangers to the blood of sacrifice, and maybe here the return of the year was ensured by the blood of a chosen victim - even a human one. In any case you are more likely to find a grotto of Herakles near a place devoted to athletics, as at Archaia Thera on Santorin, than in this place of highly charged mystery.
The Sacred Way reaches the summit of Mount Kynthos by long flights of easy steps. A mountain it is, though less than five hundred feet high - who would dare call it a hill? At midday the sun beats down and the lizards reluctantly move aside before the feet of per¬spiring tourists. If you are ever able to spend a night within range, then sunset or dawn are the times to climb to the top of this bare but intensely numinous height. In the evening you can watch the sun go down behind Syros into the western sea, but if you have once seen the sun come up over the Aegean, and the islands quicken into colour and shape, you have a memory that can be taken anywhere in the world. It is a seascape which one revisits in dreams, and in the midst of great cities. One can be reabsorbed into it, and there is no other region into which one can slip back so happily.
On the peak of Mount Kynthos one understands and feels the
whole of the Aegean. The sketchy outlines of temples built up here for the chief Athenian gods, Zeus and Athena, seem irrelevant compared with the view from the final rocky outcrop. Close to the north is Tinos, to the east Mykonos. Westward is Syros, and beyond that you know that only Kea and Kythnos lie between you and Cape Sounion. South, across a fifteen-mile channel, are the two humps of Paros and Naxos. Away to the east, already lit by the rising sun, but invisible behind Mykonos are Ikaria, Patmos and Samos - the end of the long chain of stepping-stones which join Europe to Asia.