Island idyll

Mykonos

Lying northward of the sacred island of Delos, Mykonos is as profane as it gets. Largely barren, it used to be a brothel during ancient times, or so Herodotus tells us, and it continues its erotic, carnal ways as the mecca of gay and lesbian love. Sir Elton and Lady John were just here, received like royalty by the gay community, which is comprised mostly of foreigners. The locals are very liberal in their acceptance of ‘foreign customs’, as they call them, ‘as long as nobody comes near my children’.

The place was known only to a few of us back in the late-Fifties for its whitewashed picturesque houses, 365 churches and its windmills. Then Cole Porter visited on a private boat, word got out about the clearest water in the whole wide Med, and then came the end: Jackie Kennedy arrived while her hubby was in the White House and went shopping. The next thing we knew a boutique selling sandals, fake Pucci blouses and all sorts of trinkets popped up on the ground floor of every house around the port, soon to be followed by thousands of gays, who discovered the greatest beaches on which to run around nude this side of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Well, you can guess the rest. Gays and straights have co-existed peacefully ever since, while real-estate sharks descended on the island and began to build houses for rich Athenians bored of looking at the Parthenon all year round. Mind you, although the place exploded with cheap tourism and cheaper nightclubs and restaurants, the local authorities kept to the island style, and no matter how rich and bullying the tycoon, the houses, some of them worth in the tens of millions, all have to adhere to the whitewashed picturesque design Mykonians made their own long ago.