On my third day on Leros in late February, I was feeling drawn to the far
north of the island. Its main settlement was Partheni: ‘Virgin’, named probably
for an ancient cult of Artemis, or an older goddess. The whole area was one of the emptiest spaces on the Leros map, one of the most untouched parts of Leros, cut
off from the bay of Alinda by the limestone peak of Kleidi.
It was a warm day and I’d swum in the morning and worked for a while on the shady terrace, my feet in the sun, while Lisa lounged on her bed. The electricians were drilling. One shouted a question and the other responded, ‘Logika!’, meaning something like ‘probably, should be’ – it seemed a vague sort of answer to a question about electrics.
While the road to the airstrip led all the way north, I decided to take a more winding route over a green hill topped by the church of Ayios Kyrikos. We passed some new development that seemed out of keeping with the local styles, but also donkeys and horses with coloured tassels on their halters. Rounding the hillside, I was stopped in my tracks by the view below: of course it hadn’t been marked on the map, but there was a huge army base. I knew part of Partheni was a military zone. I descended on the track, checking with the armed young guys at the gate that I was on the right path.
The valley ended at a raised wall, the dam of a failed reservoir project. The new, empty road curved around and beyond it was the airstrip, ending at the sea beside a dry dock for yachts, and more military buildings. The sea beyond – Partheni bay, protected by Archangelos islet – was completely smooth and calm, like a lake, with fish farms and a scattering of fishing boats. The whole place felt strangely quiet, which added to the intrigue.
In fact, strange is exactly how
it should feel. Leros has a fascinating modern history – an extraordinary century
that belies its current calm and beauty. I knew a little, but over the coming
weeks that I would end up spending on Leros, I realised just how steeped the whole
island is in its remains. A café owner would say to me, ‘We are known for so
many bad things… When will we be known for good things?!’
A little history is in order,
then. In July 1923, at the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey gave up
its claims on the Dodecanese islands, populated by Greeks for millennia; Italy had ‘liberated’ the islands from
Turkey in 1912, and in 1922 Mario Lago was appointed Governor of what were now designated the ‘Italian islands of the Aegean’. The Italians decided the port at Rhodes
was too small for its Royal Navy, and in 1923 started to build up a base around
the sheltered, deep bay at Lakki on Leros. Since the island garrison comprised many
thousands of men, over the 1920s and 1930s they built a new model town with
straight, wide streets and Rationalist art deco architecture, much of it still
standing, called Porto Lago.
‘Imagine,’ Takis, a business
owner in what is now called Lakki again, told me later. ‘We were five thousand
people then, and there were thirty thousand military personnel on the island at
one time. But this is not written in the Greek history books because then we
were part of Italy.’
There’s much to tell about this
phase, but crucially, little Leros had a bay suitable for re-fuelling submarines,
a strategic base that would allow aircraft to reach the Middle East, and a vast
number of Italian military personnel. So in the Second World War, when all the Dodecanese
were battlegrounds at one point or another, Leros was a critical target, and there
are military remains in every part of the island.
Someone told me: ‘The Battle of Crete – not to diminish
it – lasted one week. The Battle of Leros lasted fifty-two days. Constant
bombardment.’
I followed the road around to the
bay of Blefouti, unprepared for its sheer loveliness: a wide sweep of pale blue
sea fringed by beach, mostly backed by lush fields sweeping up to the mountain. And I seemed to have the whole place to myself, though
alas, only a couple of hours before dusk. I spotted what looked like a
crumbling Italian observation tower on the top of the far headland, and went to
investigate. I hadn’t come to Leros to look for war remains, yet I couldn’t help being fascinated by the abandoned buildings.
The empty road gradually gave way
to dirt track and on the slope was a large, somewhat grand building with a
portico of tall arches and a large Mediterranean pine outside. This was the
remains of battery Pl.899, shown on a 1940s Italian map as antinavy e
antiaerei – now clearly used by a farmer to shelter his goats. We said
hello as he carried a bale of hay up the hill, his dog at his heels, the sheep
and goats clamouring down the hillsides to follow him.
For now, I had to head back. We
took a shortcut to avoid some barking dogs, and I stopped to chat with a man at
a closed taverna, then we walked down the wide, empty, tree-lined road, pausing
at an old double chapel with beautiful icons between a cement works and
building materials suppliers. A car pulled up so close I thought it might hit
us, then a man with a beaming smile wound down his window and said, ‘I’m
listening! First impressions of Leros!’ It took me a moment to realise he was
one of the guys from the other night at the grill house.
Further down the road, I passed a
young guy on a motorbike leading two ponies on ropes up the road. I stopped to
buy fresh eggs and local beer from Stamatia, and told her I’d walked to
Partheni. She looked at me as if I was mad, then related a long story about her
boyfriend’s animals, the only part of which I really understood was about
slitting their throats… I was loving Leros, and staggered back to the room to read
more about it.
A week or so later, I went back to Partheni, for two reasons. The first was to pick up my mum, who was arriving on the 7 a.m. flight from Athens. I’d just arrived at the airport and got out of the car I'd rented when I heard the roar of the little plane coming in overhead. It pulled to a halt just before Partheni bay, then trundled back to the terminus. The passengers were out within minutes, and the airport would soon be closed again for a few days.
Later, after breakfast at the
bakery in Kamara, I took Mum to see lovely Blefouti. The hills behind the bay
were largely unspoiled; a few houses here and there, an organic vineyard hidden
in a fold of hills with grazing cows. In a little cove, I now recognised a
rusted old bit of metal as some kind of artillery.
But what I really wanted to see
this time related to a later piece of modern history. We left the car at the
start of a headland and walked above the fishing harbour, and I asked a farmer feeding goats with huge, twisted horns if we were heading the right way for Ayia Kioura.
After the Second World War, Leros
was liberated and with the rest of the Dodecanese became officially part of
Greece, though the country was immediately divided by Civil War, those who had
resisted the Germans now seen as the ‘Communist’ enemy by the right-wing
establishment. Then in 1967 there was a coup by the army, starting the Regime
of the Colonels, or the Junta dictatorship. Many
left-wing intellectuals and artists were sent into exile on little islands. Between 1967 and 1974, political prisoners were detained at the old Italian
barracks at Partheni.
Among the ‘kratoumeni’ on Leros was Manolis Glezos, politician, author, hero, best known for taking down the Nazi swastika from the Acropolis in 1941. The eighteenth-century chapel of Ayia Kioura Matrona, built on the site of an older chapel and situated a kilometre away from the camp, had fallen into ruin and Glezos organized a few artists among the prisoners to restore it and paint new frescoes.
Work began
in 1969 with the support of the islanders. The artists used fellow prisoners as
models. The soft, flowing, haunting figures exude a sense of peace, the
large eyes full of emotions: true sorrow and bright hope, mourning perhaps not only
Christ, but Greece.
The works are fifty years old, and some plaster has fallen, revealing rusting iron bars in
the ceiling; many paintings had rough patches of gauze stuck to them. I
wondered if the prisoners would not have had access to the proper materials.
Then as I looked for a light switch, I noticed a sign by the door in Greek,
prohibiting something odd: asvestoma. The use of lime.
I found
out later: after the regime changed, certain conservative islanders decided to
lime over the unorthodox frescoes. But they’re now protected by the state as an
important monument.
Political activist and poet Yiannis Ritsos was also imprisoned on Leros at that time. One of his most famous works is 18 Little Songs
of the Bitter Homeland, later set to music by Theodorakis; sixteen of them,
he said, ‘were written in one day – on September 16, 1968 – in Partheni of
Leros’.
