Matt Singer

My trip island hopping in the Greek islands was one of the least joyful vacations I’d ever been on, until my day on Delos, when it turned into pure, unadulterated joy.

My friend Donna and I were stranded on Mykonos, not having realized that there is such a thing as an off-season in the Greek islands. It was cold and rainy, Mykonos was deserted, and the ferries leaving the island were few and far between. But there was one daily boat to Delos, an uninhabited island about half an hour away. Delos has never been inhabited, even in Ancient Greece, because it was believed to be the birthplace of the twin gods Apollo and Artemis, and therefore considered sacred. It was forbidden for anyone to be born or die on the island, so it could only be used for religious worship and trade.

Donna and I were deposited that day by a bumpy little boat and had free reign on the island until the boat left a few hours later. Delos was a wild, windy, overgrown island, strewn with ruins of temples, marketplaces, and amphitheaters, and with almost no evidence of modern life. Loveliest of all, every inch of the island was covered with wildflowers. It turned out that this was a condition particular to the month of April. If we had come any later in the year, the wildflowers would have been razed and the island would have been desert-like. Instead, we spent all day romping through multicolored fields, climbing hills and scampering over half-decayed walls, and discovering the island’s hidden secrets. There were torsos of gods who had lost their heads, mosaic temple floors without accompanying walls, the remnants of an ancient aqueduct system. Market stalls, Doric columns, stone staircases embedded in the cliffs.

And the Sacred Lake. Mmmmmm. This was the spot where Apollo and Artemis were supposedly born to Leto, who Hera banished when she found out her philandering husband, Zeus, had knocked her up. They were said to have been born under a palm tree in the middle of the lake. When Donna and I, two American girls who went on vacation at the wrong time, stumbled upon the Sacred Lake, the bed of the lake was dry and covered in windswept plants, and there, in the middle, was a huge palm tree.

Delos had a certain magic that was greater even than the sum of its stunning parts. Beyond the holy temples, the dismembered gods, the blue sea all around us, the beauty of the Sacred Lake, there was a… something… about Delos that convinced us that the Greeks knew more than they led on when they declared it sacred. We were alight with the joy of the place itself. We scampered around the island like a couple of children at play in the fields of the Lord. I felt suffused with joy and peace, intoxicated by my sense that the past was alive, and thrilled by my freedom in exploring this rocky little isle, which the Ancient Greeks claimed floated free until Zeus secured it to the bottom of the ocean. At one point, I lay down on my back in a field and took this picture.