Pirgos, Tinos, Greece

This is Lapros Diamandapoulos, a sculpter and marble mason that allowed me to use his tools and workspace to create my Cycladic Dove in marble. An easy going guy that has been in business for a long time and he continually has buddies dropping by for coffee or a chat. Maggie is a fellow sculpter from Bloomington, Indiana and survives by working in one of the cafes. I knew that I was close to the end of the road when she said that I was the first American that she had seen in eight months. She has been here for a year now and was very helpful in getting me settled in.  My masterpiece that took way too long to create and polish, but it allowed me to meet with a lot of locals to buy sand paper and hang out at Lapros's shop. I rented this 125 cc Piagio for four days to tour the island and be able to run back and forth to the port city and to Tinos town. There is a lot of this dry stacked rock walls both in the village and on the hillsides for sheep fences. A colorful boat at the port city of Pirgos. Seems that the villages are up on a hill away from the water and then they have a port city located a mile or two down to the water. As there was only one restaurant open in Pirgos, I liked to walk down for lunch as more were open here as it is more of a tourist destination. Nice beaches to the left of this photo. This is my village of Pirgos taken from my room. It is supposedly one of the prettiest villages in the Greek Islands. It is typical I think with narrow, winding alleys about 6 feet wide. Everything is on the slope of the hill so there are lots of steps and its easy to wind up at a dead end at someone's front door. Delos is an very old town and island next to Mykonos. It doesn't have any A.D.'s in its history as it was abandoned after being conquered and its inhabitants slain in 87 B.C. Only about 20% of it has been excavated and it is remarkable. Much larger than any of the more famous spots and much more pristine. Seems the early acheologists were prone to putting things back as they assumed they should be, but many of their assumptions were premature and they destroyed a lot of evidence while carting off the statues and other items to their foreign museums