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4 October 2002 - Greece - Mykonos and Delos
The quaintly picturesque Mykonos, of
the Greek isles, and it truly is charming. A tiny village of white-white buildings with
blue or green or red painted woodwork, slightly reminiscent of the Baja California coast
communities; the little bay with brightly colored small boats at their moorings; the smell
of fish that you only find at a harbor's edge… scrabbling along the pebbled beach
here’s a dog chewing on a tin can; sitting next to his scale there's a man wearing a
sea-weathered face under a beret, waiting for customers to finish selecting their morning
produce.
A tangle of twisting streets dating from medieval times, designed to confuse pirates and
invaders, make up the map. No street names, no house numbers, and the "streets"
are the width of your arm span – they don’t go straight for more than 10 feet at
a time, and are dotted with decorative octagonal red and white signs at the corners.
Clearly their purpose is nothing more than decoration - no one pays the slightest
attention to them.
Nearest the water, the streets are
lined with tourist shops, both commonplace and ultra upscale. I left my AmEx card on the
ship, by design. Good move: mid-day restaurant prices started at 18 Euros for entrees (lobster was around 50
Euros) – there were menu selections for less, but amazingly enough, those were
"unavailable today," today of course, being any day a cruise ship is
docked. And I heard you couldn’t order something to drink without also ordering a
meal – the waiter would just stand there, aloof, until you did. Long live the turista
industry.
For those on the ship to whom shopping is a competitive sport, Mykonos Town was the
place to be, Mykonos being renowned across Europe for its goldsmiths – I
window-shopped a bit, saw some very nice work, even in the few places I peeked at.
I’m sure there is spectacular design work available a couple steps off the main
tourist path, for private viewing… and at spectacular prices. Pam, the destination
lecturer, said if I was of a mind to drop $100K or two, I could do it in less than an
hour, and without half trying.
Since I wasn't in that frame of mind, I took the cameras along to the poster-child of
Greece, located here: that Taos-esque
bright-white, rounded-edge, crumble-walled church. It’s one of 365 churches on the
island, in only 17 square miles. I’d read that little fact and couldn't figure it out
– until I was there. Then I got it. Most of the churches are garage-size or smaller,
tiny little things, with an ikon, a pair of candles, and 100 square feet of floor space.
But a free-standing building, hence, a church. Those postcard-ready, quintessentially
Greek windmills also call Mykonos home, just up a little hill from the church.
I'm feeling distinctly old fashioned, with my film-eating SLRs and bayonet lenses. Others'
pocket-sized computers-with-a-lens-attached, taking up minimal space and less weight, were
glanced at with a flash of envy, as I lugged my backpack around… but digital is not
film, and while it’s handy for many things, it's not the same, doesn’t give me
the same exposure latitude, flexibility, expressivity. Would I go digital if I won the
Lotto? In a heartbeat. But in addition to, not instead of.
Harborside, there are folks sitting at the outdoor cafes, doing exactly nothing productive
(there’s a message here, I'm sure, for a Type A overachiever). Meandering back
through the charming streets, it's all close to the water, so if you get lost (and you
do), you just turn another "corner" and keep walking. Tiny second-story
balconies overflow their wooden balustrades with bougainvillea in hues of lavender, pale
fuchsia, and white, rather than the crimson we have at home. The aroma of simmering
tomatoes and scallops buffets you from every open doorway. Sleepy cats pay little mind.
Golf-cart sized delivery trucks block the way. Motor scooters. Diesel fumes. Cigarette
smoke. A little "charm" goes a long way.
But all this was after a side trip to Delos, the ancient architectural site, a treat for
those of us who enjoy looking at old piles of rocks. This, the sacred birthplace of
Artemis and Apollo, lies at the center of a ring of islands – it's a fast ferry ride
from the dock at Mykonos. I skipped the museum and wandered through the ruins, an
island-sized open-air exhibit, as long as I could take it – big hat, sunscreen 45,
and a bottle of water weren't near enough. The two main agora segments are in reasonably
good shape; there are bits and chunks of capitals and fluted columns, and some mosaic
segments. I waited for between-tourist groups to shoot, and was rewarded with an absence
of shorts and t-shirt slogans in my shot. There are also a handful of cats and brown-black
sheep, and geckoes, geckoes everywhere, the only full-time residents of the island.
I was at one end of the site, looking for the big residential mosaics, the well-preserved
ones. 2,500 years ago the town residents neglected to clearly mark the streets, so I got
lost in the ruins. But that's how I found the glory of the day, the amphitheatre set
halfway up a hill, looking out over the water. I missed the easy path, of course - worked
my way up a steep slope, brushing past scrubby vegetation and finding handholds on tumbles
of rocks without knowing where I was, or where I was going - and crested the upper part of
the seating… When it hit me what it was I was looking at, I started hyperventilating.
My heart racing faster than my mind, oh god, oh god, oh god was all I could manage
to breathe. Magic is what it was, a smallish ring – the floor is intact, some of the
patron seats in the front row still have their carved armrests, frozen from the final
performance. A few of the marble benches for the rest of the crowd, maybe another 500 or
so, are there, at least in part, built into the slope of the hill.
When I could finally move, I slipped
and scrambled down through the remnants and – awed by the connections to shadows and
voices from 25 centuries ago, so palpably present with me – I, too, stepped out onto
the floor. We stood there, turning to sweep the audience from one edge of the theatre all
the way around to the other. We spoke, and a shadowed echo of our voices was given back to
me. After a long while, reluctantly, I slipped back into the 21st century and merely
recorded what it looked like with the cameras, though nothing more illuminating than that
– I was way too close.
The miracle of this completely unexpected find, heart-stopping in
its silent glory, is my strongest memory from the islands; indeed, from the whole voyage. |
