🏺 From the Notebook

Delos is worth understanding before you land: it is not a famous ruin alongside a lived-in city — it is an entire island that was legally uninhabited for centuries. After a series of Roman-era massacres depopulated it, no permanent settlement was permitted there again, which is why the mosaic floors of its merchant houses and the stone lions on their terrace survived largely undisturbed. The island was so sacred to the ancient world — literally the birthplace of Apollo, according to Greek mythology — that even dying and giving birth on it were at one point banned so the ground would not be desecrated. What you are walking through is a place that was preserved by prohibition, not just by time.

Back in Mykonos Town, the windmills that rise at the end of Little Venice were built by Venetian rulers in the 16th century to process grain brought through the island's busy harbor. They worked until the early 20th century. The Meltemi wind that made them useful — the strong north wind that blows across the Aegean every summer — is the same wind that makes the crossing to Delos choppy in the afternoon. Every ferry schedule runs the Delos trips in the morning for exactly that reason.

The Old Town's maze of lanes was reportedly built without a grid plan — the Mykonians deliberately made it a disorienting tangle so that pirates raiding the harbor could not navigate through it quickly. Whether this is entirely true or partly legend, the result is that turning left twice and right once rarely returns you to where you started, which makes wandering it more satisfying than most places that are designed for that purpose.