Walk the sacred island where Apollo was born

An uninhabited island that was once the religious centre of the Aegean and one of its richest ports. Nobody has been permitted to be born or to die on it since the sixth century BC.

Myth puts the birth of Apollo and Artemis here, and the island’s sanctity followed from it. Athens twice ordered the island purified — graves were dug up and moved, and thereafter the dying and women in labour were ferried to neighbouring Rheneia. The rule outlasted the religion: Delos has no permanent population today.

By the second century BC it was also a free port handling an enormous slave trade, and the archaeology shows both faces at once. The Terrace of the Lions, the Sacred Way, the theatre and the sanctuary sit alongside the House of Dionysos and the House of the Masks, whose floor mosaics are among the finest surviving anywhere in Greece.

The lions on the terrace are replicas; the originals are in the site museum, safe from the salt wind. There is no town, no shade to speak of, and the last boat leaves in the afternoon.