Leros

Leros Λέρος
View of Panteli village in Leros
Leros
Location within the region
Coordinates: 37°09′N 26°51′E / 37.150°N 26.850°E / 37.150; 26.850Coordinates: 37°09′N 26°51′E / 37.150°N 26.850°E / 37.150; 26.850
Country	Greece
Administrative region	South Aegean
Regional unit	Kalymnos
Area
• Municipality	74.17 km2 (28.64 sq mi)
Highest elevation	320 m (1,050 ft)
Lowest elevation	0 m (0 ft)
Population (2011)[1]
• Municipality	7,917
• Municipality density	110/km2 (280/sq mi)
Time zone	EET (UTC+2)
• Summer (DST)	EEST (UTC+3)
Postal code	854 00
Area code(s)	22470
Vehicle registration	ΚΧ, ΡΟ, ΡΚ
Website	www.leros.gr

Leros (Greek: Λέρος) is a Greek island and municipality in the Dodecanese in the southern Aegean Sea. It lies 317 kilometres (197 miles) (171 nautical miles) from Athens's port of Piraeus, from which it can be reached by an 8.5-hour ferry ride (or by a 45-minute flight from Athens). Leros is part of the Kalymnos regional unit. The island has been also called in Italian: Lèro and in Turkish: İleriye.

Geography

Front, left to right: Arkoi, Leipsoi, Leros. Back, left to right: Agathonisi, Farmakonisi and the Turkish coastline

The municipality has an area of 74.172 km² (28.638 sq mi).^[2] The municipality includes the populated offshore island of Farmakonisi (pop. 10), as well as several uninhabited islets, including Levitha and Kinaros, and had a 2011 census population of 7,917, although this figure swells to over 15,000 during the summer peak. The island has a coastline of 71 kilometres (44 miles). It is known for its imposing medieval castle of the Knights of Saint John possibly built on a Byzantine fortress. Nearby islands are Patmos, Lipsi, Kalymnos, and the small islands of Agia Kyriaki and Farmakos. In ancient times it was considered the island of Parthenos Iokallis and linked to the Hellenistic and Roman literature on Meleager and the Meleagrides. The administrative center and largest town is Agia Marina, with a population of 2,672 inhabitants. Other sizable towns are Lákki (pop. 1,990), Xirókampos (908), Kamára (573), and Álinda (542).

History

Antiquity

Thucydides stressed the special importance of the bays and the harbours of Leros during the Peloponnesian War (431 BC – 404 BC), where Leros supported the democratic Athenians. After the end of the war Leros came under the sovereignty of the Spartans. The island had a famous sanctuary of the goddess Artemis.^[3]

It then followed the fate of the rest of the Dodecanese Islands during the years of Alexander the Great and his successors, the Roman years and the Byzantine period. After the division of the Roman Empire, Leros was part of the Byzantine Empire. On the island of Farmaco east from Leros, a few miles from Didyma on the Turkish coast, Julius Caesar was held as a hostage by local pirates for forty days.

Venetian and Ottoman Era

The church of Agia Marina

During the Byzantine Age, the island was incorporated into the Theme of Samos. During the thirteenth century, the island was occupied by the Genoese and then by the Venetians. In the year 1309, the Knights of St John seized and fortified Leros. In 1505, the Ottoman Admiral Kemal Reis, with three galleys and seventeen other warships, besieged the castle but could not capture it. The operation was repeated in 1508 with more ships, but again nothing was achieved.

Legend has it that then the island was rescued by the only surviving knight, barely 18 years old. He dressed women and children in the armor of the dead defenders, convincing the Ottomans that the garrison of Leros was still strong. Finally, on 24 December 1522, following the siege of Rhodes, a treaty was signed between Sultan Suleiman and the Grand Master of the Knights, Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, and Leros, along with all the Aegean possessions of the Order, passed into Ottoman hands which ruled the island with brief interruptions during a period of four hundred years.

During the Ottoman rule, and along with the other islands, Leros enjoyed a privileged regime, with partial autonomy and self–government. During the Greek Revolution of 1821, the island was liberated and became an important base for the re-supplying of the Greek Navy. Administratively, it came under the jurisdiction of the Temporary Committee of the Eastern Sporades.

View of the castle of Leros

With the Treaty of London, on 3 February 1830, however, which determined the borders of the newly established Greek state, the freed islands of the Eastern Sporades were given over to the Ottoman Empire again. In the "Diary of the Prefecture of the Archipelago" of 1886, Leros, along with the islands of Patmos, Lipsos and Fournoi, belonged to the Ottomans. The island's administrative council was made up of both Greeks and Turks.

The Italian Period

In 1912, during the Libyan War against the Ottoman Empire, Italy occupied all of the Dodecanese islands (except Kastelorizo). On May 12, 1912, the island was seized by the sailors of the Italian Navy cruiser San Giorgio. The Greek inhabitants of the islands declared the autonomy of the islands under the title "The Aegean State", with the aim of unification with Greece, but with the outbreak of the First World War, these moves came to nothing, and Italy retained control of the islands.

Promenade of Lakki

From 1916 to 1918, the British used Leros as a naval base. In the Venizelos–Tittoni agreement of 1919, the island was to be returned to Greece, along with all of the Dodecanese except Rhodes, but after the Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War, Italy canceled the agreement. As a result, the Treaty of Lausanne confirmed the Italian possession of Leros and the Dodecanese.

The new Italian Fascist regime actively attempted to Italianize the Dodecanese, by making the Italian language compulsory, giving incentives to locals to adopt Italian nationality, and clamping down on Greek institutions.

During the 31 years that the Italians remained in Leros, they set up a great plan to build and fortify the island, since its strategic position and its large natural harbours (the largest of which, Lakki, is the largest deep water harbour in the Mediterranean Sea), made it an ideal naval base. The fortification of Leros and the creation of a major naval base, ensured that the Italians had control over an area of vital interest to the Allies (the Aegean, the Dardanelles and the Near East). Mussolini, who called Leros "the Corregidor of the Mediterranean", saw the island as a crucial base for the Italian domination of the eastern Aegean Sea.

Portolago/Lakki

In the 1930s a new model town and major naval base, Portolago, was built by the Italian authorities. It is one of the best examples of Italian Rationalist architecture. Mussolini was said to have a mansion for himself in the town.

After Leros was transferred to Greece, it was renamed Lakki.

World War II

Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery

Windmills of the island

From 1940, when Italy entered the Second World War on the side of Germany, Leros suffered bombing raids by the British Royal Air Force. As a result of the excellent anchorage provided to warships by the many natural coves, the island was the second most bombed during World War Two (after Crete). On 8 September 1943, as Italy could not continue the war on the German side, it signed an armistice and came over to the Allied camp. After the Italian armistice, British reinforcements arrived on Leros and other Dodecanese islands and the island suffered continuous German aerial bombardment. One of the largest attacks was on the Greek Navy's flagship, the Queen Olga, sunk by German bombers on Sunday September 26, 1943, along with HMS Intrepid, while they were anchored in Portolago. The island of Leros was finally captured by German troops during operation Taifun in airborne and amphibious assaults between 12–16 November 1943. The forces involved were paratroop units and a battalion from the elite Brandenburg division. The ground troops were supported by bombers of the Luftwaffe. Among them I. and II. group of Stuka-Wing 3. I. Group operated from Megara Air Base. The island remained under German occupation until the end of the war.

Post-war history

After the Germans evacuated the island, it came under British administration, until, on 7 March 1948, together with the other Dodecanese Islands, Leros was united with Greece. From the Greek nationalist point of view, approximately 700 years after the end of Byzantine rule, the Dodecanese was once again incorporated into a Greek State. During the post-war years the Greek governments used many buildings in Leros for various reasons. In 1959, the mental hospital of Leros was founded, whose original bad conditions have been improved. During the junta of the Colonels, the island was used as a place of internal exile for political dissenters,^[4] with old Italian barracks of the island used as an internment camp.

Leros hotspot (refugees reception camp) on the Mental Hospital

In 1989 Leros came to Europe-wide attention as a result of a scandal involving embezzlement of funds and the maltreatment of about 3,000 mental patients at an institution on the island. Funding from the government led to a rapid and substantial improvement in conditions. A June 2009 BBC report suggests these improvements have not all been sustained.^[5] In December 2015 the Greek Government, the Alternate Migration Policy Minister (Ioannis Mouzalas) and the Mayor of Leros (Μichalis Kolias), decided to build a refugees’ camp (“hotspot” able to shelter 1000 individuals), located on the Mental Hospital of the island of Leros which has been internationally known as “The guilty secret of Europe”, as mentioned in the Observer’s article, written by journalist John Merritt (Sunday 10.9.1989 London Observer).^[6] In the same space of Lepida (after almost 15 years of implementing deinstitutioanalization programmes financed by E.U.), about 200 patients are still accommodated in small rehabilitation structures. The symbolic and historical significance of such a decision is very important. Lepida Mental Hospital of Leros used to be an Asylum for people with mental health problems in which more than 3000 patients have died under harsh conditions. During the dictatorship period that Greece has been through (1967-1974), 4000 political prisoners were exiled in the same spaces of the mental hospital which were used as a concentration camp.^[7]

Notable people

• Demodocus of Leros, a sixth-century BC gnomic poet
• Pherecydes of Leros
• Georgios Roussos, lawyer and politician^[8]
• Totis Filakouris, a soccer player for Panathinaikos during the years 1965–1975
• Vasilios Rizos, a soccer player for Leros Soccer club of New York 2013–present
• Olympia Karagiorgia, poet and conservation activist

Transportation

The Leros Municipal Airport at Partheni connects the island daily with Athens. There are also ferry connections to and from Piraeus and the other islands of the Dodecanese. The Catamaran Dodekanissos Express and the Hydrofoils (only during the summer) connect Leros with most of the Dodecanese islands. For those who want to visit Leros the alternative way to Ferry travel (8–10 hours) is to fly to Athens and then fly to Leros with domestic flight or fly direct to Kos and then to Leros by boat (1 – 2 hours).

Traditional Music

Many local songs of Leros are among the most famous among the traditional (nisiotika) music of Greece. Among the most famous are Pote tha'nixoume pania, Mes tou Aegeou ta nisia and Proutzos. Lerikos is the name of a local dance.

See also

• List of islands of Greece

References

• Hans Peter Eisenbach (2009) Fronteinsätze eines Stuka-Fliegers, Mittelmeer und Ostfront 1943–1944. Germany Helios Verlag ISBN 978-3-938208-96-0. 18,50 €uro. The book describes exactly the Stuka missions of I. StG 3 against Leros and Samos and against the Royal Navy in 1944. The book is based on the flight log book of a stuka pilot.

External links

• Official website (in English) (in Greek) (in Italian)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Leros.