It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s, though, after Jackie Kennedy became Jackie Onassis, that it gained its reputation as a celebrity bolthole: Grace Kelly, Mick Jagger, Burton and Taylor, Mia Farrow, Rudolf Nureyev.Īnd then it seemed to lose the plot for a while in the late 1980s. Her future husband, Aristotle Onassis, had been visiting Mykonos with Maria Callas and assorted shipping tycoons since the 1950s.Īrriving by schooner from his private island, Scorpios, he'd drop anchor at Platis Gialos, where locals would have prepared banquets of freshly caught fish and tomatoes served on upturned orange crates. But if anybody put Mykonos on the map, it was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who came with her younger sister Lee Radziwill in 1961 and vowed, upon leaving, that she would one day own a house here. 'Whatever architecture had to say, it said it here,' he declared, among the one-room whitewashed cubes. LE CORBUSIER, bespectacled modernist pioneer and urban planner, arrived in the Cyclades in 1939 and concluded that one could not call oneself an architect without having studied the houses of Mykonos. As he puts it: 'Sitting on a beautiful sofa with a cocktail in hand or meditating while watching the sky change from orange to red to blue is part of the reason I've been coming here for so long.' Or as my friend Stefanos, husband of the jeweller Diane Kordas and owner of a spectacular Moomin-trollish villa above Lia beach, says: 'Name me a place where, within two days of arrival, your stress level disappears, you look like you had a multi-thousand-pound facelift, you all of a sudden appear fitter, thinner and more attractive, and your energy levels explode.' The shoe designer Brian Atwood has been holding his birthday party on Mykonos for the past six years (last year's theme was Purple Haze and many guests, including Lindsay Lohan, Valentino and Peter Dundas, wore purple wigs). Ask any local and they'll nod their head and assure you this is directly related to the neighbouring island of Delos - in Greek legend, the sacred isle upon which Apollo and Artemis, along with light itself, were born. But above all there is the peculiar rose-gold Mykonian light, which makes even the most hungover and sunburnt among us look beautiful. The blue-crystal water and the peerless beaches - a different one every day, if you so choose - are part of its charm, along with the meltemi, the strong, dry north wind of the Aegean. As British writer Lawrence Durrell, who first visited the island in 1940, observed: 'However many tourists come with their chatter and their litter, little Mykonos will not let the stranger down.' Even in the August chaos, when the whorly cobblestoned streets of Chora, the main town, are six-deep with daytrippers, little Mykonos will do its best by you. How could it not be? Hailed as The New Ibiza each year (probably before Ibiza was The New Ibiza), this 85.5-square-kilometre slab of rock, named in honour of Apollo's son Mykons, has become everybody's top summer getaway, from A-listers to Italian quadbikers.Īnd yet. But, Zeus willing, by next summer it will be ours - it must be ours, for, come summer, there is no better place to be than Mykonos.Īs the cognoscenti know, June and September are sublime, but August is mayhem. It is still not ours, not quite, only two-thirds built and carpeted throughout with dried goat droppings. It has been four since I spotted our dream house, on top of a cliff with the most ludicrously spectacular view of Fokos, a horseshoe-shaped beach off a beaten track in the north of the Greek island. It was 10 years ago that we started summering in Mykonos. Meanwhile, weaving its knowledgeable way through the low-slung tables, where pewter buckets of icy rosé and plates of fried calamari have been set down, is a golden retriever with a faded red bandana around its neck.
The Cycladean answer to Padstow, if you will, with the dusty car park full of windsurfer boards being hoisted into the backs of Jeeps as lunch segues into happy hour. Shoulders the colour of conkers, pareos fashioned from Louis Vuitton leopard-print scarves, diamonds, a conspicuous lack of make-up and perfect masculine top knots. The crowd? Distinctly Athenian beach bum. A sprawling, reed-thatched shack dotted with swaying pumpkin-gourd lamps, pulsing slightly with sounds from the still-chilled DJ set.