Exploring the quieter side of the Cyclades on a Greek island hopping holiday

The party island of Mykonos steals the spotlight, but a short ferry ride away, tranquil Tinos and Delos offer ancient history, holy sites and rugged beauty

A woman crawls, slowly – very slowly – along the pavement. She’s wearing kneepads. Before her walks her husband, carrying a red candle as tall as himself. On the main steps to the church of Panagia Evangelistria, we pass two more people proceeding on hands and knees. But this is not a surprise: we are on the island of Tinos, outside one of the holiest sites in Greece. If we’d come in August, there’d have been many more pilgrims crawling uphill, over 800m, all the way from the island’s main port, in sweltering heat.

The church they’re inching towards is a neoclassical marble beauty with wedding-cake decorations of blue and red. Inside, black-cloaked priests chant in candlelight and clouds of incense. Even for the irreligious, it’s a moving experience to see pilgrims, many of them now in tears, queueing to kiss the holy icon, said to have been discovered after a local nun had a vision from the Virgin Mary.