Six islands
Sunday 14 September 2025
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.
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. That’s 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.