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.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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 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]
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".
