After breakfast at our hotel, Tim, Granddad, Sue, and I took the bus into town to catch the ferry to Delos. After a short ferry ride we arrived in Delos, a completely uninhabited island, and met our tour guide to begin our explorations.
While one of the smallest of the Greek islands, Delos is one of the most sacred as it was the birth place of Apollo and his sister Artemis. As the birthplace of Apollo, Delos is also the birthplace of sun, and is historically one of the sunniest places on Earth. Zeus was the father of Apollo and Artemis, but their mother was Zeus’s mistress, and Zeus’s wife was very jealous and feared by many and for that reason, no one would accept Zeus’s mistress into their port except for Delos.
In addition to its importance in Greek mythology, Delos also thrived as a commercial center under Roman rule because the Romans declared it a tax free port. Despite its small size, approximately 1 square kilometer, Delos’s population at the end of the 2nd century B.C. was approximately 20-30,000. Delos was also a very diverse city with people from many different nations/religions co-existing. Citizens of Delos were free to worship their own Gods; others often assumed that their neighbor’s God may likely be the same God as their own, just with a different name. Evidence of this is found in the fact that Delos was home to the first Synagogue and that temples exist not only to Greek gods but to Egyptian ones as well. Delos was destroyed once in 88 B.C. by the Miltradetes and once more in 69 B.C. by Pirates. Delos was never fortified because they believed they were protected by the Gods, so when destruction occurred, its business and people moved on elsewhere and neighboring islands further decimated the city, re-using its structures for their own building materials. Today only 1/7th of excavations are complete.
After arriving back in Mykonos we stopped in town for gyros before Tim and I headed to the bus stop to catch a bus to Platy Gialos, a beach recommended to us both by Steve and the locals. The beach was nice, although we did have to pay 10 Euros for a couple of beach chairs and an umbrella, the beach was so packed with them you couldn’t lay a towel down between them anyway. The water in the Mediterranean is very cool, but refreshing on a hot day. After a couple of hours blobbing at the beach we headed back to our hotel to freshen up real quick before meeting the group to head to dinner.
We had dinner with the group at a little Greek Taverna just up the street from our hotel, I had the stuffed tomatoes which were very nice. After dinner, Tim, Steve, and I headed into town to watch a bit of the soccer. We enjoyed a few beers, or in my case more of that ridiculously cheap wine, and in no time the game was over. Somehow I managed to drag Tim into a dance club where I had another couple glasses of wine, although as Steve and Tim both informed me very little ended up in my mouth, most of it ended up on them or on the floor. What can I say it’s hard to dance with a full glass of wine! Needless to say I laid off the wine for the next couple of days.
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