The Sacred Harbour

Every great festival on Delos began here. When the Athenian general Nicias led his city's sacred delegation to the Delia, he did not want his choir to tumble ashore in disorder, so, Plutarch says, he had a bridge of boats, gilded and hung with tapestries, built across the strait from Rhenia and brought the singers over it at dawn in full song.

Beside the landing lies the Agora of the Competaliasts, named after associations of Italian freedmen and slaves who honoured the Lares Compitales, the Roman gods of the crossroads. It is a small, paved square of the late Hellenistic period, and the holes cut into the slabs held the poles of awnings, so you are looking at the footprint of a market. From its corner the Sacred Way runs north towards Apollo.