To Partheni

 

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’.