When I moved to San Francisco in the mid-80’s, Mykonos seemed to be on the lips of all globe-trotting homos of the previous generation. They’d return to San Francisco golden-hued, with their stories of nude beaches and dancing until dawn. Close to 30 years later, and at about the same age as those guys, I finally made it to Mykonos, this weekend with my little Stavros. I didn’t return with any golden hues, maybe a slightly pinker face, and it being October, no swimming, except for one Scandinavian skinny dipper. Off season there were fewer tourists, cheap hotels and places to sit for the sunset along the waterfront in Little Venice. The nightlife here is still great, or at least it sounded great, the thump thump thump of dance music all night blaring from even mom and pop convenience stores.
From Mykonos we took the boat to Delos, only about 20 or so minutes away. It’s where Artemis and Apollo were born, after Zeus got Leto pregnant. Zeus’s wife, Hera, forbid anyone on solid ground from helping her out, so Leto settled on Delos, which at the time wasn’t attached to the earth, a floating island.
Delos is near the geographic center of the Cyclades archipelago, and for a long time an important religious and political center, the meeting place of the Delian league, founded in the late 5th century BC, and the home of the Delian games. The island is a protected archeological site, and most of the ruins date from around 600 BC to the 2nd century AD. With no distracting contemporary structures, and so much of the town’s form and layout legible, one gets an incredible sense of what it was like to visit the island 2,600 years ago. The world’s oldest known synagogue is here, too. And it must have been the party island before Mykonos, judging from the many phallic representations and monuments to Silenus and Dionysos.
