Lemnos Island
Lemnos is one of the most strategically placed of the Greek islands. Lying off the entrance to the Dardanelles, it played an important part in wars as far apart as the siege of Troy and the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. It also saw the decisive sea battle in the last fight for inde¬pendence from Turkey in 1912. Today it is an important military outpost for a Greece which is still suspicious of Turkish intentions.
After the Latin conquests of 1204 it was for a time exploited by Venetian merchants, but being so close to Constantinople it was one of the first islands to be retaken in the brief Byzantine revival. In 1355 it was taken by the Genoese, and for over a hundred years it was the headquarters of the Gattilusi, who also controlled Thasos and Samothrace. The Turks came early to Lemnos, and after a year’s heroic resistance they overran the island in 1479. The Greek revolt won it back in 1829, but they had to exchange it by treaty for Euboea, and it was not until 1912 that success in the Balkan War secured it finally for Greece. Until 1924, when the Greco-Turkish exchange of populations took place, Lemnos had quite a large Turkish element. Now no Turkish hodjas call the faithful to prayer and divide the worship of God with their Orthodox brethren. Instead Greek army bugles call the soldiers to their drill or their meals.
At least three places have been rated in their time as the principal city of Lemnos. Today it is Minna, which has a fine harbour on the western coast, protected from the prevailing winds and with a won¬derful view over the sea from its higher ground. It is at the end of the long ferry run out of Agios Konstantinos, which connects it with Kavala and the northern Sporades, and in the other direction with Mytilene on Lesbos and Kymi on Euboea. Dominating the town is a formidable castle, built on a craggy headland by the Gattilusi in the fourteenth century, though much of the fortification now visible was contributed by the Turks later on. It is a strenuous climb in hot weather, but from the top you can make out Mount Athos, thirty-five miles away to the west.
The quay where the ferries and cargo ships berth is featureless and noisy, and the hotel overlooking it would be tolerable only for a night if you arrive late. Yet the little enclosed harbour for fishing boats is both natural and colourful. Between the two a narrow winding street leads up through a scene you would not at first associate with a Greek island - not a bucket of whitewash nor a tubful of geraniums to be seen. When the shops are open and the wares spill out on to the pavements you might be in an eastern souk. Yet when evening comes
and the traffic stops this is where the young people and families of Mirina come out for the volta, rather than along the harbour front. Traditional craftsmen like tailors, carpenters, shoemakers, metal¬workers and even barbers go on working in their dens well into the night.
You will discover a different face of Mirina if you take any side street on your left as you reach the upper town. In a couple of minutes you will emerge on a fine esplanade which follows the line of a wide beach of soft sand, and behind it there is a long row of dignified nineteenth or early twentieth-century houses. Some of them are now public buildings, but many were built by prosperous shipowners and are still in private hands. Among them are three very important buildings: the Museum, the High School and the residence of the Metropolitan Bishop of Lemnos. The public beach stretches a long way further on, and right at the end of the bay is a good-looking luxury hotel complex, with bungalows, tennis courts, swimming pool and other amenities discreetly laid out on a series of well kept garden terraces. The beach below is beautifully sheltered, but inevitably crowded when the hotel is full.
Should you arrive by air from Athens (by far the quickest method) you will find the airport occupying a low-lying isthmus, central between two distinct halves of the island. On the southern side is the great harbour of Mudros, where the British fleet lay during the Gal-lipoli campaign. The Gulf of Bournia takes another bite out from the north, so that Lemnos is almost cut in half at this point.
Travelling from the airport to Mirina you will have a good view of the western half, as the road passes from wide tracts of arable land into the sterile brown hills which surround the bald peak of Prophitis Ilias. It is a volcanic landscape, and was probably never as well wooded as either the northern or the eastern Sporades. Although there is no volcanic activity today, ancient myth claims Lemnos as the home of Hephaistos (or Vulcan, to give him his Latin name), who was the patron of smiths, metal-workers and jewellers. The story goes that Hephaistos was rash enough one day to berate Zeus about the way he treated Hera, whereupon Zeus hurled him out of Olym¬pus. The smith-god fell upon Lemnos, breaking both his legs, with the result that ever afterwards he could only walk with special gold leg-braces he had made for himself.
It was probably not only the volcanic nature of Lemnos which made the Greeks consider the island sacred to Hephaistos. Metal-working first reached continental Greece from the Aegean islands,
and it is likely that Lemnos had an early tradition of ironwork and metallurgy. In the workshops of Mirina you will find that it still has that tradition.
The eastern parts of Lemnos are fed by streams which water more fruitful valleys. Citrus fruits and plums are grown, and prune-drying is one of the local industries. The true home-dried Aegean prune, with its delicate aroma and its lovely dark blue colour, is a far call from those dark withered things long associated with institutional meals in England. Sadly, though, you may ask in vain for damaskina at the supermarket or general store, where local products have given way to continental imports of packaged foods.
The oldest known site for a capital city was at Poliochni on the far eastern coast, a few miles south of the village of Kaminia. This was the most advanced neolithic centre in the Aegean, as can be seen when you visit the museum in Mirina, and it remained an outpost of civilized life well into the late Bronze Age. The most ancient city, which stood on a steep cliff close to the sea, was first excavated with three later ones by the Italian School in the 1930s, and ascribed to the fourth millennium BC-considerably antedating the first city of Troy. Walls, towers and gates of a later date still stand as high as sixteen feet in places, and built as they were about 2000 BC they still predate Homeric Troy by several centuries. The Italians renewed their exca¬vations after 1945, and fifty years later they were still unearthing new traces of domestic civilisation of a high standard. When the Greek fleet passed on its way to attack the seventh city of Troy the artistic standards of Poliochni were already in decline, and eventually it was destroyed by an earthquake.
It was probably Poliochni that saw one act of the ‘Lemnian deeds’ - atrocities often referred to by later writers. There are two stories which gave the island such a bad reputation. In this one the women of the island, loyal followers of Hephaistos, neglected the service of Aphrodite when she deserted him for Ares, god of war. Her revenge was to visit them with an evil-smelling complaint which in turn made their husbands neglect them for sweeter companions - whereupon each wife save one murdered her husband. The exception among the victims was the king, who was saved by his daughter Hypsipyle, and when the Argonauts called on their way to Colchis Jason picked her out of the many who were ready for male consolation. The Argonauts stayed for two years and successfully repopulated the island.
It could have been near Poliochni too that Philoctetes was ma¬rooned by his shipmates on the way to Troy. This was because of the
insufferable smell of a leg made gangrenous by a snakebite. The play of Philoctetes by Sophocles describes how the Greek leaders, realiz¬ing that because he carried the bow and arrows of Herakles he was essential to the war, sent an embassy to Lemnos to persuade the now resigned castaway to return with them. With Odysseus as the chief persuader, and a doctor on hand to cure him, they prevailed,and it was Philoctetes who killed Paris with an arrow-shot in front of the walls of Troy.
It seems that there must be some connection between the legen¬dary hero suffering from - and being cured of - gangrene, and the famous ‘Lemnian earth’, the terra sigillata of antiquity. This ’stamped earth’ was impressed with the head of Artemis in classical times, and was considered a cure for snakebite and festering wounds. The earth was dug up by a priestess, on one day of each year, from a barren mound near the modem village of Kotsinos on the eastern side of the island. This Lemnian earth continued to have a wide sale throughout eastern Europe, and you may be able to find it still on sale in the island. Galen went to see the digging of the earth, and recorded that it was considered so valuable that only one waggon-load was allowed to be removed every year. Until recently the tradition was still observed on 6 August, the feast of Christ the Saviour, under the surveillance of a priest.
The role of leading city next passed to Hephaistia, where the Italian School excavated a north coast site on the promontory which divides the Gulf of Bournia from the smaller bay of Tigani. They found an eighth-century BC necropolis and evidence of earlier occu¬pation going back to late Minoan and Mycenaean times. The pottery was unusual in showing an uninterrupted development into the Archaic and Geometric styles. From the sixth century onwards, if not before, it was the main seaport of Lemnos, though the harbour gradu¬ally began to silt up.
Hephaistia would have been the scene of the second tale of atroci¬ties which Herodotus couples with the earlier example of ‘Lemnian deeds’. He is explaining how Lemnos became subject to Athens early in the fifth century BC, but the story begins hundreds of years before when the Pelasgian population of Attica was dislodged by the Achaians and found a new home on Lemnos. By way of revenge they raided the Attic coast near Brauron and carried off a number of women taking part in a religious festival. These women, treated as concubines, bore children to their captors. Later the Lemnians of legitimate birth took exception to the arrogant and aggressive
manners of the half-Athenian bastards, and massacred them and their mothers. Such behaviour in the Greek world nearly always brought nemesis in its train, and when not only the married women but even the animals in the fields became barren, representatives were sent to Delphi to ask how they could purge the island from this crime.
The answer was simple: they were to go to Athens and offer to make whatever reparation the Athenians asked for. The Athenian answer was equally simple: they must cede their country and all its goods to Athens. The Lemnians retorted that they would do this but only ‘if a ship can reach our country from yours in one day with a north wind blowing’ - another version of the Greek Kalends, given the relative positions of Lemnos and Athens. However, ‘very many years later’, as Herodotus says, Miltiades the Athenian general found himself after the Marathon campaign of 490 BC in control of the Thracian Chersonese, at a time when the meltemi were blowing strongly from the north:
When the Etesian winds were well established, Miltiades son of Kimon arrived in Lemnos by ship from Elaios in the Chersonese, and published an order for the Pelasgians to quit the island, re¬minding them of the oracle - something which the Pelasgians had never expected to be fulfilled. The Hephaistians promptly gave in, but the people of Mirina, refusing to admit that the Chersonese was the same thing as Attica, had to endure a siege before they too capitulated.*
We see that by now Mirina was on an equal footing with Hephaistia, and perhaps felt more secure in their redoubtable acropolis. The ancients would have even better cause than we have to know the inevitability of those ‘Etesian winds’ in the Aegean during the sailing season. As for Miltiades, he was a ruthless character and eventually came to a bad end on Paros.
On the other side of the pleasant bay of Tigani is Kabeirio, a site whose name suggests that the mysteries connected with the Kabeiroi may have begun here rather than in Samothrace. They do seem to have been less refined than what went on in Samothrace - orgia rather than musteria - and were connected not with sailing and shipwreck but with drinking and metal-working, so more appropriate to the island of Hephaistos. The Italians discovered the foundations of an Anaktoron and a Stoa, and of a huge building which they
identified as a Hellenistic Telesterion, or Hall of Celebration, with a facade of twelve Doric columns.
The scenery of these northern bays is the most attractive in the island, and with two such important archaeological sites it is a pity they are so difficult to reach - and the same applies to Poliochni on the east coast. The road system is extensive, but the buses which use it are scheduled primarily for the. transport of schoolchildren into Mirina from distant villages and back. The bus going to Plaka in the far north-east passes within five miles of Hephaistia, and another stops at Kaminia, about two and a half miles short of Poliochni, but in neither case does it return the same day. It is well worth while to hire a car for a few days if you want to explore the island properly.
Most people will think of going to Mudros, the second largest town, which overlooks the great land-locked bay. It is a magnificent natural harbour, about twice the size of Kalamitsa in Skyros. It is curious to compare these empty acres of water today with the old photographs which show hundreds of transports, battleships, cruisers and destroyers at anchor. The sea keeps no records, and only the Allied war graves at Mudros and a few place names like ‘The Pier of the Australians’ serve to remind that it was from here that the vast and ill-fated expedition to the Dardanelles was launched. Mudros itself is nothing to look at, and has no amenities, while even the village of Nea Koutali across the bay — dubbed ‘picturesque’ in the guide books because it has a few trees - has little to offer.
The most attractive villages are Kontias, Thanos and Platy, on hillsides facing the southern sea not far from Mirina. The first two on closer inspection have a deserted air, being too big for a depicted population, but Platy overlooks a very long sandy beach, easily reached on foot from Mirina. At the far end of the beach a big restaurant and entertainment complex shows how popular it is in the season, but as the beach is over a mile long there should be a bit of room for all. The road passes a large and obviously efficient military encampment.
Whether or not you succeed in reaching Poliochni, Hephaistia or Kabeirio, you must on no account miss the Museum in Mirina. Although the most valuable finds have inevitably gone to Athens, this is a fascinating collection of objects from the Neolithic to the Hellenistic and Roman ages. In particular insist on seeing the rooms on an upper floor, where finds from Poliochni are displayed in a most illuminating sequence which compares its development with that of the first six cities of Troy.