Delos

  For a good part of the day at the Mykonos stop we took a ferry to the nearby isle of Delos where there’s quite an impressive city of ruins to explore. We did a Rick Steve’s audio tour of the town and hiked up to the tippy top of a rather steep mount Kynthos to get a great view of both Delos and Mykonos from a distance.

On the ferry to Delos. 

Once we got there we saw this very ominous cloud coming towards us.

Delos was an absolute gold mine of in situ mosaics. We just stared at this one for a long time. It's incredible that these were just in casual family homes. I'm thinking once our back patio starts cracking this is going to be my cover up project. Any subject suggestions??

Once the cloud hit us we got absolutely dumped on. We stood next to a wall for a little shelter for a bit, and then were forced to move on in the rain.

Delos was an important trade port for a long time, and before that was a religious holy site where no one was allowed to be born or die, in other words no one could actually live here. It was used as a treasury for the Delian league that Perikles in Athens created to unify the Greek islands in the 400 BC ish era. Later Perikles exploited the treasury for Athen's excesses and created a rift in the league that ultimately escalated to the Peloponnesian wars. 

It was neat that the ruins were not protected at all. We could simply walk in and out of the houses of the many Greek citizens that lived here.

The island was named "Delos" which means "visible", because Leto, the titan mother of demigods Apollo and Artemis, was suffering the wrath of Hera after discovering her husbands infidelity. She was hidden on an invisible island "Adelos" meaning invisible. When the twins were born the island became visible, or "Delos". 

Hiking up Mt. Kynthos

At the summit with Mykonos in the background.

This is, in fact, exactly what it looks like. Gotta love the ancient cult worship of Dionysus.

In front of the iconic lion statues.

Some of the reconstructions of these monuments are really haphazard.

As the boat sailed away from the islands we saw the back of Delos, terraced all up the hillsides, probably with a huge amount of buried ruins left to discover. It’s really fascinating to see that there is actually a lot of known antiquity still waiting to be discovered.