Leros

Leros surprises first-time visitors. Its main port, Lakki, is unlike any other Greek island town. It resembles a small Italian provincial city of the 1930s, with broad avenues, Rationalist civic buildings, porthole windows, a market hall, a former cinema and a curved waterfront laid out at right angles. That is exactly what it is, and the contrast with everywhere else in the Aegean is the reason to come.

During the Italian occupation of the Dodecanese, from 1912 to 1943, Lakki was rebuilt from scratch as a model naval base for the Regia Marina, the Italian navy. The architects Rodolfo Petracco and Armando Bernabiti designed it in the stripped-down modernism of the Mussolini era. It survives unusually intact for two reasons. The war ended Italian ambitions in the Aegean before the project was finished, and the town has never been heavily redeveloped since. It is one of the most complete pieces of Italian town planning from between the wars anywhere outside Italy.

The rest of the island is quieter. The deep natural harbours that drew the Italians also drew Byzantine and Venetian fortification. The medieval Castle of Panteli looks down on a small fishing village of the same name, where most guests prefer to eat dinner. Below the castle, on the eastern coast, Agia Marina is the older settlement and the everyday Greek port. In antiquity Leros had a sanctuary of Artemis, and the small Archaeological Museum holds figurines and inscriptions from it.

In November 1943, after Italy’s surrender, German paratroopers fought a bitter five-day battle against British and Greek forces for control of the island. The Battle of Leros effectively ended the Allied effort to hold the Dodecanese. The war cemetery is on the road south of Lakki. Leros makes a good two-night stop on a longer Dodecanese itinerary, rather than a destination in its own right.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    LRS, the small municipal airport at Partheni in the north, takes the one-hour flight from Athens: Olympic Air flies the route most days, and Sky Express runs inter-island legs from Astypalaia and Kalymnos. The crossing from Skala on Patmos takes 45 minutes on the Dodekanisos Seaways fast boat, into the harbour town of Lakki.

  2. The address

    Archontiko Angelou in Alinda is a pink-and-white country house built in 1895 by Aikaterini Cambouropoulos for her daughter Marika, to drawings by an Austrian architect. It has ten rooms, two of them suites, in a garden of 5,500 square metres 250 metres from the bay, and it is run by the granddaughter of Lolos Angelou, who converted the house in the mid-1970s. It takes adults only, and breakfast is made in the house and served on trays in the garden.

  3. Mylos by the Sea

    Mylos by the Sea stands on the Agia Marina waterfront beside the old stone windmill, run by the brothers George and Marios Koutsounaris. Marios cooks with the Japanese ikejime method, a way of killing fish that keeps the flesh firm, and George keeps a cellar of around 200 labels. It opens from 15 March to 30 October for lunch and dinner, and tables in high season must be booked ahead.

  4. The marina

    Leros Marina, run by Evros S.A. in Lakki Bay since 1989, was the first marina and boatyard in the south-eastern Aegean. It has 220 berths afloat and 600 dry-dock places, fuel, a 200-tonne lift and a hull-cleaning yard, and vessels up to 50 metres lie on the outer quay. The office is multilingual, and there is a cafe-restaurant on site.

  5. The Hotel Leros

    The former Albergo Roma in Lakki was designed by the architects Petracco and Bernabiti and opened on 21 April 1938, with the Giacomo Puccini cinema-theatre beside it. In April 2022 the Ministry of Culture approved a 2.1 million-euro restoration from the national Recovery and Resilience plan: a 20-room municipal guest house for visiting artists, a ticket point for the island’s archaeological sites and an open-air cinema. The complex is protected as a listed monument.

  6. Merikia

    The War Museum sits inside the tunnels the Italians cut into the mountain at Merikia in 1930 as an ammunition depot, and it opened in August 2005. Weapons, maps, photographs and uniforms from the time of the Battle of Leros are kept in the cool of the rock, with a military park of retired vehicles, tanks and aircraft above. It opens in the summer months only, 9am to 1.30pm.

  7. The war cemetery

    Leros War Cemetery, on the shore of Alinda Bay 2 kilometres west of Agia Marina, is kept by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It holds 183 burials, 13 sailors, 162 soldiers, four British airmen, two of the Royal Canadian Air Force and two South Africans, and 58 remain unidentified because their records were destroyed in the German occupation; Brigadier Robert Tilney surrendered the island at 5.30pm on 16 November 1943. The cemetery is open at all hours.

  8. The castle

    The Byzantines built the Castle of Panteli on an ancient acropolis in the 10th and 11th centuries, and the Knights Hospitaller held it from 1314 to 1522, adding a third ring of defences in the 15th century; four of their coats of arms remain on the walls. The Ecclesiastical Vestry of Byzantine Art, beside the church of Panagia tou Kastrou inside the walls, opens 8.30am to 1pm.

  9. Artemis honey

    Thyme honey under the Artemis label comes from KoiSPE, the Social Cooperative of the Mental Health Sector of the Dodecanese, founded on the island in 2004 with EU LEADER+ funding. Its laboratory at the former Italian Caserma estate handles around 60 per cent of the honey Leros produces each year, and pollen analysis shows 41 per cent thyme. The cooperative employs people in recovery, a link to the island’s long psychiatric history.

  10. The Bellenis Tower

    The Bellenis Tower stands behind its garden on the coastal road of Alinda, a stone mansion built in 1925 by Parisis Belenis, a Lerian who made his fortune in the Greek community of Cairo. Its style is Italian eclecticism, Roman and Neo-Gothic at once. It now holds the island’s historical and folklore museum, with a room that records its requisition as a German military hospital in the war.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Lakki

    Lakki, on the great bay of the west coast, is the island’s principal harbour and the one town in Greece built whole to a single design. The Italians built it in the 1930s as Portolago, a naval base laid out in curving boulevards of Rationalist architecture. A yacht lies off the waterfront, under the arcades and rounded façades of the Fascist-era town.

  2. Agia Marina

    Agia Marina, the largest town and administrative centre of Leros, is the harbour on the east coast where most of the ferries come in, under the medieval castle on the hill. A yacht lies at the town quay, with the neoclassical waterfront and the windmills of the ridge behind. It is the busier side of Leros, across the narrow island from Lakki.

  3. Pandeli

    Pandeli is a small bay on the east coast, directly below the medieval castle: a fishing harbour of caïques drawn up on the shore, with tavernas along the water. The bay was a landing point in the Battle of Leros in 1943. It is one of the prettier anchorages on this side of the island, within tender reach of Agia Marina round the headland.

  4. Partheni

    Partheni is the northern bay, site of the island’s small airport and, in antiquity, of its famous sanctuary of Artemis, the goddess whose name, Parthenos, the place still carries. It is the quiet end of Leros, with the runway along the shore and the empty coast beyond. A yacht lies here, away from the two harbour towns in the middle of the island.