The remains of an unfinished temple of Apollo in Naxos
I arrived in Naxos yesterday, and now I’m sitting on the balcony of my hotel room, looking out onto the swimming pool and a courtyard full of palm trees. The hotel is nice, despite the comically crappy room. (The fridge hums incessantly and the air conditioner makes a strangled growling noise; one half of the mattress has collapsed.)
Next week I will catch a ferry back to Piraeus, and then I’m staying the night in a hotel near Athens Airport so that I can be ready to catch an early flight to London. Phase Two. Should be fun.
Naxos, Delos, Mykonos, Syros, Antíparos, Paros. I’ve visited six out of over two hundred islands. But the important ones really. Naxos is the biggest, Syros is the most populous, Mykonos is the gayest (I guess), and Paros and Antíparos are the most — I don’t know — chill. And Delos is the most sacred.
The date-palm on the site where Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis
According to legend, before Delos took its place as the hub of the Cycladic islands, it used to float far and wide across the surface of the sea. Which is why it was where the goddess Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis. Listen.
In Book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Ovid tells the story of Niobe, Queen of Thebes, the proud mother of seven sons and seven daughters. Niobe believes that she is more worthy of worship than Leto — Latona in Latin — who has only two children, Apollo and Artemis.
Now, ask what the reason is for my pride [says Niobe], and then dare to prefer Latona to me, that Titaness, daughter of Coeus, whoever he is. Latona, whom the wide earth once refused even a little piece of ground to give birth on.
Land, sea, and sky were no refuge for your goddess. She was exiled from the world, until Delos, pitying the wanderer, gave her a precarious place, saying “Friend, you wander the earth, I the sea.” There she gave birth to twins, only a seventh of my offspring.
Of course, this goes as well as you might expect. Leto has Niobe’s children killed — Apollo shoots her sons with arrows, her husband the King kills himself, and then Apollo kills her daughters. Niobe’s grief is so great that she becomes a marble statue, still weeping as the wind erodes her away.
In response, the people of Thebes get together to tell old stories relevant to these recent shocking events. One of the Thebans had been travelling in Lycia when he came across an altar. He asked his Lycian guide who it belonged to.
Then I asked him whether it was an altar to the Naiads, Faunus, or a local god, and my friend replied ‘Young man, it is no mountain spirit in this altar. She calls it hers, whom the queen of heaven once banned from the world, and whom vagrant Delos, a lightly floating island, would barely accept, at her prayer. There, between Pallas’s olive tree and a date-palm, Latona bore her twins, against their step-mother Juno’s will. Having endured her labour, even then she fled Juno, carrying the divine twins clasped to her breast.
(The guide goes on to tell the story of how Leto, still fleeing from Juno, arrives in Lycia. She comes upon a well, but when she tries to drink from it, the local farmers try to stop her, muddying the water out of sheer malice. And so they are turned into frogs. It’s not terribly relevant, I know, but I thought you would probably want some closure.)
Delos is a small island: a bit less than four kilometres north-south and about a kilometre across. You can’t stay there overnight, but there are ferry trips from a few nearby islands, including Mykonos, which is the nearest inhabited island.
I went there on Wednesday. The boat ride took a bit over half an hour. I have had great experiences with Greek guides — hello, Constantinos and Konstantina! — but I wanted to walk around at my own pace and so I paid for an online audio tour which worked on my phone.
It’s a complicated site: Delos was inhabited for centuries — there were people there four thousand years ago, the worship of Leto was brought there by the Ionions a bit less than three thousand years ago, and the island was more or less abandoned by the end of the first century CE. The terrace of the lions was built by the people of Naxos just before 600 BCE, the phallus statue is from about 300 BCE, the ancient theatre of Delos was opened in the third century BCE, and the temple of Isis is from the second century BCE. A lot to take in.
I left Delos on the return ferry in the early afternoon, feeling blessed by Leto, which is (as we now know) not always how things turn out. After returning to my hotel for a brief nap, I went to Oregano again for an early dinner.
It’s about 2 PM. It’s hot, just under 30ºC, but the fresh sea breeze is pleasant and comfortable. I walk past a row of parked cars and enter the taverna. It’s called Oregano. Under the awning, all the tables are empty, but inside the taverna itself about half the tables are occupied. The chairs are made of wood, and the tables are covered with sheets of brown paper.
I look for a waiter and ask if I can sit down near the window. He nods and goes to get me a menu. The menu is big, pages and pages long — each item has a name and description in Greek, English and Italian.
While I’m leafing through the menu, the waiter approaches and asks me if I want to come with him to see the day’s specials. I say yes.
I follow him through the restaurant and into a massive dark kitchen. A lot of people are working here. There’s a row of bains-marie under glass, and behind them, skewers of roasting meat. The waiter rattles off a list of about a dozen daily specials — osso bucco with farfalle pasta, meatballs in tomato sauce, moussaka, roast lamb, Greek fish, beef stew, meatballs again, beef in risoni (orzo? kitharaki? I didn’t hear), chicken burgers, I can’t remember the rest. Perched on a shelf above the bains-marie there’s a plate of the meatballs with mashed potato.
“Can I have the meatballs?” I ask.
“Mashed potato, rice or pasta?”
“What’s best?”
He gestures at the plate on the shelf. “Mashed potato,” he says.
“I’ll have the mashed potato then.”
I go back to my table and and wait. The waiter brings me a plate of pita bread and some horrible chilled red wine in an anodised aluminium jug. The man at the next table lights up a cigarette. Surprisingly, I find this charming.
I arrived in Mykonos yesterday and went straight down to the old town, which is called Hora.1 It’s a maze of twisty little passages, all alike — white walls, blue accents, stone pathways. A lot of shops selling expensive designer clothes and jewellery. Little secluded bars. It was much fancier than the old town in Paros, fancier than Antíparos, fancier than Naoussa.
And crowded! There were two huge cruise ships in the port when I got there, and so the streets everywhere are full of people. Older people, mostly, but a few gay men who weren’t saving their strength for the evening’s clubbing.
I checked out a few restaurants: pretty, with extensive outdoor seating and elegantly typeset menu boards, and dishes all about twice the price of the food in Parikia.
While I’m waiting for the meatballs to arrive, I look out the window at the shop across the street. It’s a supermarket. I should really go to the supermarket to get some breath mints, and maybe just to see what it’s like.
The sign on the wall of the supermarket calls it a Βασιlόπουλος, which I suppose is like a megastore, only royal.2 The text underneath it is trickier: και του πουλιού το γάλα. And the milk of something? I ask Google Translate. And bird’s milk as well. I look the up the phrase and find an article in Greek about its origin. It means that the shop sells absolutely anything you might want. Even bird’s milk. (It’s possible that πουλί comes from the Latin word pullus, which means a baby bird.)
The food arrives. It’s savoury and delicious. It even manages to complement the terrible wine.
Accommodation in Mykonos is expensive, unsurprisingly, and so I booked a cheaper hotel about a mile away from Hora, further up the hill. The area is kind of suburban, with busy roads and roundabouts, and lots of big shops — toy shops, pet shops, medical centres, local restaurants like Oregano, bakeries, fruit shops. All in low, white flat-roofed buildings like the buildings in Hora, but without the heritage theme park vibe.
And unlike the cramped and grimy hotel room in Ermoupoli, this is a suite, with a spare bedroom, a kitchenette, and a balcony with a table and chairs and a sun lounge. And the shower is huge, with reliable hot water and proper satisfying water pressure.
Tomorrow morning, I’m going down to Hora and the Old Port to catch a boat to the nearby island of Delos. It’s the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, and the ruins there are extensive and important: temples, a theatre and the Terrace of the Lions. It’s been on my bucket list for a long time.
On the way back to my hotel afterwards, I’ll pick up my laundry and then check out the supermarket. Bird’s milk. Why not?
Now that I’m in Naxos, I discover that its main town is just called Hora (or Chora) as well. In Classical Greek, χώρα just means place or position (or country); in modern Greek a town gets called Χώρα if it has the same name as the island that it’s on. ↩︎
Here’s what Maria has to say about Basilopoulos: “By way of supermarkets, Basilopoulos and Sklavenitis are the Colesworths of Greece, being given a run for their money by new player My Market, as well as Lidl.” ↩︎
I arrived in Athens on Wednesday evening, after nearly two whole days of travelling. To explain: Calvin found and paid for all of the flights, using points as much as possible, and making sure that I had a pleasant, if somewhat indirect trip from Sydney to Athens. The first leg was Sydney to Taipei, the second was Taipei to London. Then an overnight stay at a hotel near Heathrow, where I had a terrible dinner and a brilliant night’s sleep. Then London to Paris, then Paris to Athens. I had lovely seats, and lounge access at all the airports, but by the time I landed in Athens, I was tired and grumpy and in no mood to put up with the inexplicable lack of signage at the airport metro station.
Athens
So I caught a cab to my hotel in Athens. It was near Syntagma Square, right in the middle of everything, and surrounded by Japanese restaurants, not far from the Plaka and the Acropolis and basically all of the places that I wanted to visit.
But the first place I wanted to visit was the barber. It’s always fun to get a head shave and a beard trim when you’re abroad. This time, there were hot towels, a straight razor disinfected on an open flame, lotion, a massage — the whole thing. A fast way to recover from a slow voyage.
The food was good, and to my surprise there was a cute little gay bar just behind the hotel, with cheap two-for-one low-alcohol cocktails starting at 7 PM. A nice way to wind down before bed.
I was only in Athens for a couple of days, just to orient myself before heading off to unfamiliar places. I went to Athens last year with the School’s Classics Tour, and so I didn’t feel much pressure to visit every museum and every archaeological site. But I had to visit the Acropolis again, didn’t I?
Paros
Parikia
On the Saturday morning I caught a ferry to Paros. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I really liked it. I stayed in the main town — once called Paros but now known as Parikia. It’s touristy, sure, but it’s a little town full of those white and blue buildings characteristic of the Cyclades, and there’s a long strip of inexpensive restaurants lining the bay. This is where, for the first time, I accomplished my mission — to sit by the water, read a book, drink beer and eat souvlaki.
I got to see some other places during my four-day visit. First, Antíparos. This is a much smaller island facing Paros across a narrow strait. I caught a ferry there one morning on a rare whim and walked the length of the shopping district. It’s very pretty, but much fancier than Parikia and a bit less chill. I kept walking after the shops ran out, and I came to a beach on the other side of the island. It was 30ºC, but I had no swimmers, so I stood in the cool blue water for a while before heading back to the ferry.
Sifneiko Beach
Also fancier than Parikia was Naoussa, a beautiful fishing village in the north of the island. Nick and Dina suggested that I should go there at night, when there are dancers and nightlife and young people, but I’m on holidays and I absolutely insist on being in bed by then, so I went there first thing in the morning. It was beautiful, and definitely worth a visit, but I ended up going back to Parikia in the early afternoon for a beer and a late lunch.
Naoussa
I liked Paros a lot. The hotel was really pleasant, and the young man who ran it was friendly and generous and full of helpful advice. The food in Parikia was simple and inexpensive, the water was beautiful, and once you got away from the port itself, everything was quiet and relaxed. Four days wasn’t enough: I would definitely like to go back.
Syros
‘Well, what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has travelled in the Aegean will confirm this. Hmm, yes. I think so.’
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Chapter 4
I arrived on Syros late — the ferry from Paros was delayed by over an hour, for a journey that was only supposed to take just over an hour. Still, I have an app, which tracked the ferry’s slow journey from Naxos and which set my mind at rest during a brief panicked moment when I thought I had failed to get off at my stop. (Clearly neither Douglas Adams nor St John of Patmos had access to this app.)
The Church of the Resurrection of the Saviour, Ermoupoli
Ermoupoli is the biggest town in Syros and the capital of the South Aegean region. It’s not a tourist spot like Parikia, it’s a proper town where people live, with shops and offices and a port full of massive cargo ships. And it doesn’t have those blue and white Cycladic buildings: instead, it consists of a pile of neo-Classical buildings set on the side of a hill so big that I have no intention at all of climbing to the top to visit the two enormous churches there.
I’m in my hotel room now. It’s very small and grimy, with a minuscule bathroom and very slow wifi. It does have air conditioning, which means I can retreat to it every few hours for an awkward shower when everything starts to get too sweaty.
I don’t really plan these trips at all. I still don’t know where I’ll be staying at the end of next week. Which is why I ended up in a terrible hotel room in Ermoupoli with no real idea of what I would do for five days.
It’s basically 30ºC every day, and the sun is relentless. But before I got to Syros I had only been swimming once, at a bar in Paros just a mile from the hotel, where I had a beer and went for a swim while the bar staff guarded all of my precious electronic devices.
But this grimy hotel has beach access, if by beach you mean an old concrete jetty jutting out into the bay. And so I can leave my devices in my hotel room and walk down and swim in the cool blue waters of the Aegean, which I’m doing twice a day. In the morning, after my first swim, I go to the terrace on top of the hotel where I can dry my clothes, look down at the beach and read my book.
It’s my last day on the island of Paros. It’s quiet time in the hotel, between 3 PM and 6 PM, and I’m sheltering from the heat and brightness for a couple of hours before heading off for an evening walk.
According to Greek Wikipedia, Paros is the third largest island in the Cyclades, about 150 kilometres southwest of Piraeus, which is the port near Athens where I boarded the ferry that brought me here. Paros is an island made of marble, which is how I first heard of it.
In this passage from Book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas, the son of Venus, appears out of thin air before speaking to Queen Dido for the first time. He is beautiful.
Aeneas stood there, shining in the bright daylight,
like a god in shoulders and face: since his mother
had herself imparted to her son beauty to his hair,
a glow of youth, and a joyful charm to his eyes:
like the glory art can give to ivory, or as when silver, or Parian marble, is surrounded by gold.
Fifteen years ago, when Calvin and I lived in Marrickville, our next-door neighbours were Nick and Dina. When Nick told me he was born in Paros, and that he spent a few months a year there, I told him that I knew about the island and its marble from its mention in the Aeneid. He told me about the quarries there, and after his next visit, he brought me back a little figurine of Parian marble, a bust with a round face whose only feature was a long straight nose.
Yesterday, I went and visited Nick and Dina in their home near Marmara, a small village on the other side of the island. (In both Greek and Latin, the name Marmara means marble.) Nick showed me the house where he was born and drove me around to show me where he grew up and to give me the chance to take some photos.
After that, Nick and Dina took me to lunch outdoors at a taverna in Marmara — a massive lunch of Greek salad and grilled meat. And then Nick drove me back to the port of Paros in Parikia, when I’m staying. But not before he carried out a plan he might have conceived more than fifteen years ago.
In Marathi, about five kilometres from here, there is an extensive complex of marble quarries, where Parian marble was mined as early as the 7th Century BCE. There are open cut mines, and a complex of underground mines, including the mines of Pan and the mines of the Nymphs. Sadly, these are too dangerous for the public to visit; they apparently extend hundreds of metres underground, supported by pillars of marble that have been left there to support the roof.
The marble from these quarries was famous for its translucency and used in sculptures throughout the Greek world, including the pedimental sculptures from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, which I was lucky enough to see during the School’s Classics Tour last year.
A week ago, I left Sydney’s wettest August in thirty years. Here in Greece, it’s blisteringly sunny every day. After Nick dropped me off in Parikia, I stopped at a bar for a drink and then walked back to the hotel. An hour or two later, before the sun set, I was asleep.
I’m in Taipei, waiting for my connecting flight to London. Just a few minutes before I’ll have to board. But I thought I’d say hi before I go.
I’ve got a six-week holiday ahead of me. I arrive in London this afternoon, where I’ll be spending the night in a hotel near Heathrow Airport. Tomorrow morning I fly to Athens. After a few days there, I’m getting a ferry to Paros, and I’ll be spending about three weeks visiting various Cycladic islands. The plan: to sit by the water, read a book, drink beer and eat souvlaki. With the occasional visit to an archaeological site thrown in.
After that, a couple of weeks in the UK. Visiting Joe for a week or so, then catching up with friends, as well as a brief trip to Amsterdam with James.
