Vance #6 delos island plus 81st birthday dinners

From Vance's email. delos island plus 81st birthday dinners. 9/30/2014 3:24 PM 

a lovely breakfast, the german folk sang happy 81st to me and then i had a really great bkast of boiled eggs, toast, 3 jams, super yogurt, mean really great yogurt, almost chunky like ice cream with honey and coffee. a cab posited me at the pier for the 45 min trip to delos. on board maybe 150 people, kinda like biblical babble, german, english, french, japanese, mandarin, all chatting and having a good, anticipatory time. the sea was rough returning.

we were met by an english speaking guide who gave a very dense lecture before departing on a fast tour of the marble and rock ruins of a lively city. very sophisticated in its day complete with cisterns for gathering water deep beneath the ground as well as rain water and sanitary drains. in fact there were very modern wooden planks with appropirate holes for the men after dinner to use. men dined alone, women, children and slaves in another room. the houses were enormous by todays standards, 4000 sq feet and four stories high. wooden roofs, marble and wooden lintles. everything had to be imported, marble, wood, food, no farming space on the island. sunny but barren.

many religions were allowed there without represssion of any kind. an enormous colossus of apollo dominated the island. 30,000 people lived there at its peak. it was a the most important commercial port in the agean. the mosaics in the floor, the wall paintings, sculpture and pottery housed in the musuem here on delos and in athens are simply beautiful. it is exciting to place yourself back in those times and imagine what your life might have been on delos, shop owner, father, mother, child slave.

our guide spoke very quickly and it was very very windy so hard to hear at times though she was informed. at times was almost running to keep up taking pics and listening. i did not use my new hiking sticks, way too cumbersome and slow.

the history is complex and many millenia involved so if you are interested below is wikipedia info or no. your choice. the quality of life is amazing to imagine. 

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oh, today was a special dinner, of course celebrating 81 seasons on this earth. it all began at nikos restaurant with sea urchin salad, a little sauce dish of sea urchin with a bit of bread. i had chosen 2 small red mullets to be grilled. but...delivered, dry, over grilled with little chunks of sea salt making it crunchy, way too salty and inedible, bill please! ok, out of there, rushed, mismanaged restaurant.

back to kolinas from last  night. chose a small sea bass from many specimens. they give that fish to the grill man and soon you receive a perfectly sea bass. lesson, when in doubt get out a bad situation like nikos as fast a possible. let it go.

the elegance and delectation of eating a whole fish. lots of bones, simple fish grilled with nothing but olive oil...no salt, licking bones. served with the head on. behind the eyes are the cheeks, best part of the fish. missed by many. skin crisp, flesh moist and tender. this is perhaps one of the best fish restaurants in all of greece, the world maybe. owned by a fisherman it is simple and true. deeply apprecaited.

tomorrow boat to rafina, bus to pireaus, boat to piros, then to meet charlene and to galatas.

DELOS

The island of Delos, Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann,1847.

The theatre.

Investigation of ancient stone huts found on the island indicate that it has been inhabited since the 3rd millennium BC. Thucydides identifies the original inhabitants as piratical Carians who were eventually expelled by King Minos of Crete.^[2] By the time of the Odyssey the island was already famous as the birthplace of the twin gods Apollo and Artemis. (Although there seems to be some confusion of Artemis' birthplace being either Delos or the island of Ortygia.) Indeed between 900 BC and AD 100, sacred Delos was a major cult centre, where Dionysus is also in evidence as well as the Titaness Leto, mother of the above-mentioned twin deities. Eventually acquiring Panhellenic religious significance, Delos was initially a religious pilgrimage for the Ionians.
A number of "purifications" were executed by the city-state of Athens in an attempt to render the island fit for the proper worship of the gods. The first took place in the 6th century BC, directed by the tyrant Pisistratus who ordered that all graves within sight of the temple be dug up and the bodies moved to another nearby island. In the 5th century, during the 6th year of the Peloponnesian war and under instruction from the Delphic Oracle, the entire island was purged of all dead bodies. It was then ordered that no one should be allowed to either die or give birth on the island due to its sacred importance and to preserve its neutrality in commerce, since no one could then claim ownership through inheritance. Immediately after this purification, the first quinquennial festival of the Delian games were celebrated there.^[3]

UNESCO World Heritage Site

Delos
Name as inscribed on the World Heritage List
Column with phallus at the Stoivadeion
Type	Cultural
Criteria	ii, iii, iv, vi
Reference	530
UNESCO region	Europe and North America
Coordinates	37.393333°N 25.271111°E
Inscription history
Inscription	1990 (14th Session)

After the Persian Wars the island became the natural meeting-ground for the Delian League, founded in 478 BC, the congresses being held in the temple (a separate quarter was reserved for foreigners and the sanctuaries of foreign deities.) The League's common treasury was kept here as well until 454 BC when Pericles removed it to Athens.^[4]
The island had no productive capacity for food, fiber, or timber, with such being imported. Limited water was exploited with an extensive cistern and aqueduct system, wells, and sanitary drains. Various regions operated agoras (markets).
Strabo states that in 166 BC the Romans converted Delos into a free port, which was partially motivated by seeking to damage the trade of Rhodes, at the time the target of Roman hostility.
Italian traders came to purchase tens of thousands of slave captured by the Cilician Pirates or captured in the wars following the disintegration of the Seleucid Empire. It became the center of the slave trade, with the largest slave market in the larger region being maintained here.
The island was attacked in 88 BC by the troops of Mithridates VI of Pontus, a staunch enemy of Rome, who killed some 20,000 of the resident Romans and Italians. Another devastating attack was by pirates in 69 BC. Before the end of the 1st century BC, trade routes had changed; Delos was replaced by Puteoli as the chief focus of Italian trade with the East, and as a cult-centre too it entered a sharp decline.
Due to the above history, Delos - unlike other Greek islands - did not have an indigenous, self-supporting community of its own. As a result, in later times it became uninhabited.
Since 1872 the École française d'Athènes ("French School of Athens") has been excavating the island, the complex of buildings of which compares with those of Delphi and Olympia.
In 1990, UNESCO inscribed Delos on the World Heritage List, citing it as the "exceptionally extensive and rich" archaeological site which "conveys the image of a great cosmopolitan Mediterranean port".