Rineia

Rineia is a low, uninhabited island in the Cyclades lying just west of sacred Delos and southwest of Mykonos, to which it now administratively belongs. At only 14 square kilometers and rising to a modest 136 meters, it is easy to overlook next to its famous neighbors, yet in antiquity it played a specific and unusual role: in the 6th century BC the Samian tyrant Polycrates conquered the island and dedicated it to the Delian Apollo, and its southern half became the official necropolis of Delos.

That role grew even more important in 426 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, when Athens ordered Delos ritually purified — every tomb on the sacred island was dug up and moved to Rineia, and further burials on Delos were banned outright. From then on, anyone near death, along with women about to give birth, was ferried across to Rineia so that Delos itself would remain untouched by death. The island later passed, like the rest of the Cyclades, under Roman control, and it kept a small population as recently as the 1980s before being abandoned for good.

Today Rineia is empty of people but not of visitors: its quiet bays are close enough to Delos and Mykonos to make it a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Greece looking for an uncrowded anchorage with a genuinely ancient backstory.