Mykonos and Delos - Cruising The Aegean

By Ray Chatelin

Photos By Toshi

MYKONOS, GREECE - From Kastro's Bar you can see the windmills. Here, in the area called Little Venice, is where you find the most comfortable view in Mykonos and the best Strawberry Daiquiri in all of Greece - if not the entire Western world.

In summertime Mykonos, there's an ongoing festive air, for in the Greek Aegean Islands this is where the action is the most. It's a playpen at all economic levels for the rich, the curious, and the adventurous.

There are 500 churches, a couple of buses, three telephones, 16 hotels and a handful of taxis to handle the onslaught of laughing, joyous tourists who come on private yachts, ferries, and by air to the 35 square mile island. The summertime population is about 35,000. In the winter it drops to 8,000 - all locals readying for the next season or forgetting the last.

And, three miles across a narrow strait is Delos, the once holiest island in Greece that quietly reminds visitors of past glories. It seems to sit in quiet judgment of the tourists from Mykonos who come for a three-hour taste of its former greatness.

In the Aegean colors dominate. In Mykonos they overwhelm. The brown, aged soil of the Greek island grows directly out of the sapphire-blue waters. Freshly painted fishing vessels of blues, reds, yellows, and turquoise bob on the gentle harbor swells. The town is a rich kaleidoscope of blue and red windows, doors, and terraces against gleaming white houses.

If you like to watch people, you'll love it here. It's where one goes to be noticed. Outlandish is the norm. So is chic. You'll want to be dressed up. And the more outlandish you are the easier you'll fit in into the background of bright colors and individual styles.

The best place to people-watch is from the cafes that ring the main harbor, especially after 10 p.m. which - like in the rest of Greece - is the magic hour when it seems the entire population takes to the streets and restaurants. Gays, straights, wealthy Greek shipping magnates, beach-sleeping university students, beautiful women, peacockish men, local fishermen, and Petros the cantankerous 15 year-old town Pelican who bites, parade in an ongoing wave that doesn't stop until morning.

Mykonos is a place for the senses. The shops are filled with designer jewelry and the labels of international fashion houses. Narrow walk-way streets are crammed with small boutiques and countless pastry shops, restaurants, and art galleries. On Mattheou-Andronikou street, you come into contact with the finest stores and best dressed people on the island. The smells of Greek food, of ocean breeze, and expensive perfumes mingle with the sounds of Greek music, ongoing conversation, laughter, boats, water, and the summer winds. The endless feast that masks as Mykonos has servings of restaurants for every taste and budget. Some are more fashionable than others. Philippi's is the recognized headquarters for the rich and the famous who want to eat out. Boisterous hugs and greetings fill the air as customers try to out-entrance one another. As at other "fashionable" places in Mykonos, the food is incidental to the theater. The local wine, Kava Kambas, is a superb white. Greek food is Mama's cooking. It's tasty, stick-to-the ribs cuisine that consists of lamb, fresh sea food, moussaka, Greek Salad laden with goat cheese, olives and olive oil and a variety of Greek wines and beer. The wines are surprisingly good. Retsina, of course, is that well known resin-tasting wine that some compare to gasoline. That's served with lunch. But there's also a wide variety of Greek wines - each island seems to have its own - that are pleasant to the palate.

Eating on any Greek island is an adventure. When you enter a taverna you're often (not always in English-speaking Mykonos) invited into the kitchen and you point to what you want. There's always enough broken english and sign language to get the order right. The key to surviving Mykonos for the normal Mykonos day - from about noon to the next dawn - is to enjoy everything. It's a place determined to have fun.

As with all of the Aegean islands, Mykonos was once a target for pirates. The town plan which resembles a large maze was designed to confuse invaders. And it still works. But what a place to lose yourself.

Kastro's is a good watering hole. So is Montparnasse. Both bars are located in the Alefkandra, or Little Venice area, where buildings are constructed to the waterline. Both bars offer classical music, views of the famous Mykonos windmills and great warmth and character. If you're in Mykonos for some time you'll want to visit one of the two great beaches - Paradise (for straights) and Super-Paradise (for gays). In recent years women have gone topless on Mykonos.

After dinner and a severe jolt of Greek coffee, you can go to any number of entertainment spots. The "in" places change from year to year, but there are some that remain traditionally Greek. At Thalami's bar Greeks gather to dance. (We're talking about a starting time of midnight at the earliest). By four or five in the morning, most of the night places close, but there's always one or two spots. The Yacht Club at the pier is open for the first glimpse of the raging sunrise that seems to focus on Delos, rising out of the ocean as a tribute to what once was Greece's glory.

DELOS It was in Delos Apollo was born, say the legends. Once considered so hallowed no one could be born or die on it. The aged, the ill, and expectant were taken across a narrow channel to a small adjacent island, Rehenea. At its zenith, Delos was the cross roads of the Aegean with the Dorians moving southward and the Ionians moving northward. It was the center of all commerce and religion and a cast of priests once ruled here. But the holy men changed loyalties to the Athenians who stole the treasuries and then built the great Athenian temples in 500 B.C. Delos is a short trip from Mykonos where guided tours leave in the early morning and descend upon the small, 3 mile long (North to South) and 4265 ft. wide island. The small boat glides past the sun-scorched hills that have stone fences marking the boundaries of ancient properties. Only a few French archeologists live among long-silenced streets that lead only to more ruins and marbled walls and columns bleached by the blazing Greek sun. Everywhere you look there is an unbroken parchness of dry soil and broken stone.

Armed with maps people quietly move from building to temple to theatre, stopping at obvious landmarks like Cleopatra's house; the still magnificent mosaics in the House of Dionysus and the House of Masks; the ancient semi-circled theatre with its crumbling hillside benches.

The tourists are silent, walking about the ruins, knowing they are following in the footsteps of the ancients and pilgrims who came to worship Apollo and his sister Artemis. It's as though everyone at once decides it is somehow disrespectful to congregate, to talk loudly.

In the spring the temples and the foundations are surrounded by a carpet of wildflowers - blood-red anemones in lush, green grass. In the summer, though, when the temperatures are in the high 30's and there's no rain for months, it's the wind that you notice. It's a dry wind that parches lips and grass alike and you feel it whip past the archaic lions that have remained intact for thousands of years.

Everything here is oddly current. In the rubble is ample evidence of our own lives. There's the cisterns that held the water for the 20,000 citizens; the tiny courtyards surrounded by small houses. You can imagine them as the condos of their time - spaces where housewives told husbands they really must move to someplace larger. The remains of bigger homes on the hillside are where the wealthy lived and had the best oceanside locations as the wealthy still do back home.

It's just a 20 minute walk from the dock to the top of Mount Kynthos, at 367 ft. the high point on the small island. From there you can see across to Mykonos, the fun island - where you must return after a swim in the sheltered bay of Delos where, centuries ago, ancient Greek poets, artists, and philosophers once bathed.