A brief boat ride from the thrumming nightclubs of Mykonos lies the UNESCO heritage site of Delos, one of the most important sanctuaries of the ancient Greek and Roman world.
Surrounded by piercing azure waters, Delos’ 2,000-year-old buildings offer a microcosm of information on daily life during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
However, the site known for its temples guarded by stone lions could be gone forever in half a century, scientists warn.
Photo: AFP
“Delos is condemned to disappear in around 50 years,” said Veronique Chankowski, head of the French archeological school of Athens, which has been excavating the site for the past 150 years under licence from the Greek state.
The tiny Aegean Sea island’s silent drama could not be more at odds with the bustle of neighboring Mykonos, which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.
The worst structural damage is visible in an area that once housed trade and storage buildings in the first and second centuries BC and is not accessible to visitors.
“Water enters the stores in winter. It eats away at the base of the walls,” said Jean-Charles Moretti, the French mission’s director on Delos and a researcher at the French state institute for the research of ancient architecture.
“Every year in the spring, I notice that new walls have collapsed,” said Moretti, who has taken part in digs on the island for the past 40 years.
In the space of 10 years, the sea has encroached by up to 20m in some parts of the island, Chankowski said.
A study by Aristotelio University in Thessaloniki last year found that increasing temperatures combined with high levels of humidity can significantly affect the chemical composition of certain materials used in cultural heritage monuments.
“Just like the human body, monuments are built to withstand specific temperatures,” study supervisor Efstathia Tringa, a meteorology and climatology researcher at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, told the Kathimerini daily earlier this year.
A steady stream of tourists from Mykonos, who often veer away from permitted areas, constitute an additional problem.
In the summer, only a handful of archeologists are at hand to supervise.
To the ancient Greeks, Delos was the birthplace of Apollo, god of light, arts and healing, and of his sister Artemis, goddess of the hunt.
The siblings were among the chief deities of the Greeks and the Romans.
At the height of its acclaim during the Roman era, Delos attracted pilgrims and traders from across the ancient world and ultimately grew to a bustling city of about 30,000 people.
However, the island’s popularity proved its undoing. It was looted twice in the first century BC and eventually abandoned altogether.
For now, wooden support beams have been used to shore up some walls, Chankowski said.
However, more robust measures are complex and will require a multi-disciplinary response, she added.
“All coastal cities will lose significant areas currently located at sea level,” said Athena-Christiana Loupou, a Greek archeologist who guides groups through the site’s main attractions.
“We replaced plastic straws with paper straws, but we lost the war” to protect the environment, she said.
It is usually a serene two-and-a-half-hour ride on Japan’s famously efficient bullet train, but on Saturday, the journey quickly descended into a zombie apocalypse, with passengers screaming in terror. Organizers of the adrenaline-filled trip, less than two weeks before Halloween, touted it as the world’s first haunted house experience on a running Shinkansen. On board one chartered car of the Shinkansen, about 40 thrill-seekers were ready to brave an encounter with the living dead between Tokyo and the western metropolis of Osaka. The eerie experience was inspired by the hit 2016 South Korean action-horror movie Train to Busan, in which a father and
IRANIAN THREATS: Revolutionary Guards chief Hossein Salami said that it would be a ‘mistake’ for Israel to attack Iran and if it did ‘we will strike you again painfully’ Israel yesterday bombed a Syrian coastal city, while the US conducted multiple strikes on targets in Yemen nearly a month into Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza all belong to the so-called “axis of resistance” led by Iran, which on Oct. 1 conducted a missile strike on Israel. Israel has vowed to retaliate for the strike. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards chief Hossein Salami yesterday said in a speech that Tehran would hit Israel “painfully” if it attacks Iranian targets. “If you make a mistake and attack our targets, whether in the region or in
NEW RECRUITS: A video released by Ukrainian officials allegedly shows dozens of North Koreans lining up to collect military fatigues from Russian servicemen Russian aerial strikes wounded more than a dozen and knocked out electricity for tens of thousands of Ukrainians overnight in attacks on residential areas as temperatures dropped toward freezing, Kyiv said yesterday. Ukraine also said it had targeted a crucial Russian explosives factory, about 750km from the border, in an overnight drone attack, while Moscow said it had shot down 110 drones, the largest attempted aerial barrage by Kyiv in more than two weeks. At least 17 people were wounded in an attack on Kryvyi Rig, Ukraine, including a first responder, the Ukrainian State Emergency Service said. “At night, the enemy attacked Kryvyi
The space rock that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period caused a global calamity that doomed the dinosaurs and many other life forms, but that was far from the largest meteorite to strike our planet. One up to 200 times bigger landed 3.26 billion years ago, triggering worldwide destruction at an even greater scale, but as new research shows, that disaster actually might have been beneficial for the early evolution of life by serving as “a giant fertilizer bomb” for the bacteria and other single-celled organisms called archaea that held dominion at the