Delos is a small, dry, uninhabited island in the middle of the Cyclades, about ten kilometres from Mykonos. In antiquity it was one of the most sacred places in the Greek world, and later one of its busiest ports. The whole island is an archaeological site and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

According to the myth, Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis here, holding on to a palm tree beside a small lake. That story made Delos holy, and everything that followed came from it.

An island where nobody could be born

Because Apollo hated death, the Athenians decided that the island had to be kept ritually clean.

The first purification came around 540 BC, when the graves near the sanctuary were removed. The second, in 426 BC, went much further: the contents of every grave on Delos were dug up and moved to the neighbouring island of Rineia, and a law was passed forbidding anyone to give birth or to die on Delos. Women about to have a child, and people who were dying, were taken across the water.

The rule was kept for centuries.

Treasury, then free port

After the Persian Wars, in 478 BC, Delos was chosen as the seat of the alliance of Greek city-states led by Athens. The common treasury was kept here until Pericles moved it to the Acropolis in 454 BC.

The island's second life was commercial. In 166 BC Rome handed Delos to Athens and made it a free port, and within a generation it became one of the great trading centres of the Mediterranean — and one of its largest slave markets. Merchants came from Italy, Syria, Egypt and Phoenicia, built houses and clubhouses, and brought their own gods with them. At its height perhaps thirty thousand people lived here, on an island with almost no fresh water.

That is why Delos has a temple of Isis, a sanctuary of Syrian gods, and what may be the oldest synagogue in Europe.

The end

Rome's favour was also the island's undoing. In 88 BC Mithridates of Pontus attacked and destroyed it. In 69 BC pirates sacked what was left. Delos never recovered, and by the early Middle Ages it was empty.

What to see today

The Sanctuary of Apollo is the centre: temples, altars, treasuries and the bases of hundreds of statues, laid out around the Sacred Way.

The Terrace of the Lions faces the Sacred Lake, where Leto is said to have given birth. Naxian sculptors carved them from marble around 600 BC. Accounts of how many there were vary from nine to nineteen; five survive more or less complete, with fragments of three more. The lions on the terrace are copies — the originals were moved indoors in 1999, after a century of wind and salt had eaten into them, and they are in the museum. One more was taken by the Venetians in the eighteenth century and still stands at the Arsenal in Venice, wearing a head that was carved for it later.

The Theatre Quarter is the part that surprises people. These are ordinary streets of a Hellenistic town — houses of two and three storeys, shops, workshops, drains, cisterns — and several have their mosaic floors intact. The House of Dionysus, the House of the Masks and the House of the Dolphins are the best of them.

The Archaeological Museum on the island holds the original lions, the sculpture and the smaller finds.

Mount Kynthos, at 112 metres, takes about twenty minutes to climb. The whole site is laid out below you and the Cyclades run to the horizon in every direction.