Ancient Delos (Part 2)

The route up to the Sanctuary of Zeus and Athena with the Temple of Hera visible    

Mt Kythnos is only 112m high but it seems to tower above the valley floor on which the ancient city of Delos sits. The first inhabitants of Delos lived high on the hill; in later times the peak housed the Sanctuary to Zeus and Athena.

The house with Hermae

The current path up the hill leads across mostly unexcavated city outskirts. However, part of the way up the hill are some excavated buildings from one of the very wealthy areas. Some of these buildings are easier to get to than others – we didn’t visit the House with the Hermae but we did see some other residences on our way back down from the summit.

Temple of Hera

A short distance below the summit are Sanctuaries to the Syrian and Egyptian deities and, on a separate terrace, a Temple to Hera.

The summit

The summit is covered with mini-cairns builts by visitors over the years. There are also the remains of the Sanctuary to Zeus and Athena but the real wow-factor is the view.

Views down towards the ancient harbours and Delos    

Views towards Mikonos

Having enjoyed the views [Ed: and the wonderful cooling breeze!] we made our way back down the hill towards the Theatre Quarter, one of the oldest and, in places wealthiest, residential areas of the city.

First up, as it were, was the House with the Dolphins, with beautiful mosaic floors.

Close by is the House with the Masks, in which the mosaics seem less well preserved but where the house is far more impressive in terms of numbers of rooms and the size of the outdoor space. It also provided a good vantage point from which to look back up Mt Kythnos to see the Grotto of Hercules.

The Grotto of Hercules

We continued down into the Theatre Quarter proper. The theatre in Delos could ‘only’ seat about 5,500 people and is much less well preserved/reconstructed than many others we have seen but the view from the upper tiers of seating makes up for that. By chance, when we were visiting a tour guide was standing on the stage, talking to her clients who were gathered around her in the first couple of rows of seating. Though she was speaking quite quietly, she was still perfectly audible to Nicky right at the top of the theatre. It just goes to show how good the acoustics must have been when the theatre was in use.

Cistern outside the theatre

Outside the theatre is another enormous and, in this case very well preserved, public cistern. Ancient cities depended these as a means of storing and then supplying water to the citizens and public buildings/fountains etc. Most houses also had their own cistern under the ground floor in which rainwater was collected and stored for the family’s personal use.

Theatre Quarter housing

As we walked down through the residential Theatre and Harbour Quarters the paved pathway became narrower, and more winding, with the walls of houses close on either side. Many of the houses’ mosaic floors are still apparently in place (perhaps they are copies of the originals) and we could almost imagine this part of the city as it once was.

Harbour Quarter

Cleopatra House

In the Cleopatra House the owners had erected stautes of themselves in the house’s main entrance. The statues now in place are copies, the originals are in the Delos Museum.

Minoan Fountain (L), Monument of Carystius (top R, behind headless statue) and
Agora of the Delians (bottom R)

From the residential areas we walked around the Agora of the Delians on our way to the museum. To the east of the Italian Agora we found the Minoan Fountain, which, according to the information board near it, in ancient times had signs telling people not to bathe or wash their clothes in the fountain. Just beyond the fountain and almost directly in front of the museum is the Monument of Carystius. In about 300BC, having won a prize for theatrical performance, Carystius dedicated a phallus statue to Dionysus, the god of fertility. By the 2^nd century BC, Dionysus was extremely popular on both Delos and Míkonos, and Carystius’ monument was extended(!) with a small temple and a second phallus placed symmetrically on the other side of the temple. Unsurprisingly, given the mutilation of other statues in more recent, prudish years, the statues of Dionysus’ temple are no longer whole.

We finished our tour with a visit to the museum, which was quite a lot smaller than we had expected and, disappointingly, one wing was closed. On show in the first room is a collection of the usual bronze tools, weapons, pins, cups and jugs, fishing weights, votive offerings etc.

But it also has an excellent display giving an insight into cooking implements, stoves and lamps as well as richly decorated items such as the table pictured right, reminding us how wealthy ancient Delos was.

There are a host of fabulous statues.........

…..and equally spectacular mosaics.......

……plus some of the original stone lions. These were rediscovered between 1886 and 1906 and were re-erected opposite the Sacred Lake. However, with little protection from the elements they suffered badly from erosion and so, in 1999, they were transferred to the museum and copies put in their place outside.

So, having finished the tour we returned to BV for a swim and lunch before moving onwards in order to comply with local anchoring regulations. Over lunch we re-read our guidebook’s entry on Delos. It is hugely enthusiastic about the ruins, and rightly so. There are temples, agora and a theatre but the best parts are definitely the houses and streets of which you see so little at most sites, and some of the domestic displays in the musuem, all of which help to build a picture of ‘real’ city life over 2000 years ago.

Ancient Delos, Greece