Leros

Leros confounds first-time visitors. The principal port at Lakki does not look like a Greek island town. It looks like 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 between 1912 and 1943, Lakki was rebuilt from scratch as a model naval base for the Regia Marina. The architects Rodolfo Petracco and Armando Bernabiti applied a stripped, Mussolini-era modernism that is unusually intact today for two reasons: the war ended Italian ambitions in the Aegean before the project was completed, and the buildings have never been mass-redeveloped since. It is one of the most complete pieces of inter-war Italian urban planning anywhere outside Italy.

The rest of the island is quieter. The deep natural harbours that drew the Italians here also drew Byzantine and Venetian fortification, and the medieval Castle of Panteli surveys 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 was associated with the cult of Artemis; the small Archaeological Museum holds figurines and inscriptions from her sanctuary.

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, and the war cemetery sits on the road south of Lakki. Leros is the right two-night stop on a longer Dodecanese itinerary, not 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 operates the route most days, Sky Express runs inter-island legs from Astypalaia and Kalymnos. The crossing from Skala on Patmos is 45 minutes by Dodekanisos Seaways high-speed, into the harbour town of Lakki.

  2. The address

    Archontiko Angelou in Alinda — a pink-and-white country house built in 1895 by Aikaterini Cambouropoulos for her daughter Marika, drawn by an Austrian architect. Ten rooms across two suites and eight, set in a 5,500-square-metre garden 250 metres from the bay. Run by the granddaughter of Lolos Angelou, who converted the house in the mid-1970s. Adults-only; breakfast made in the house, served on trays in the garden.

  3. Mylos by the Sea

    On the Agia Marina waterfront beside the old stone windmill, run by the brothers George and Marios Koutsounaris. Marios works the kitchen on the Japanese ikejime method; George keeps the cellar at around 200 labels. Ranked first on The List 2024 by the FNL Best Restaurant Awards, with three FNL stars. Open 15 March through 30 October, lunch and dinner; high-season tables require advance reservation.

  4. The marina

    Leros Marina, operated by Evros S.A. in Lakki Bay since 1989, was the first marina and boatyard in the south-eastern Aegean. 220 wet berths, 600 dry-dock places, fuel supply, a 200-tonne lift, and a hull-cleaning yard. Vessels to 50 metres on the external quay. Multilingual office; cafe-restaurant on the premises.

  5. The Hotel Leros

    The former Albergo Roma in Lakki — designed by Petracco and Bernabiti, opened on 21 April 1938, with the Giacomo Puccini cinema-theatre adjoining. The Ministry of Culture approved a 2.1 million-euro restoration in April 2022, drawing on 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 carries listed-monument protection.

  6. Merikia

    The War Museum sits inside the tunnel system the Italians cut into the mountain at Merikia in 1930 as an ammunition depot. Inaugurated in August 2005; weapons, maps, photographs and uniforms of the Battle period in the cool of the rock, with a military park of decommissioned vehicles, tanks and aircraft above. Open in the summer months only, 09:00 to 13:30.

  7. The war cemetery

    Leros War Cemetery, on the shore of Alinda Bay two kilometres west of Agia Marina, is maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. 183 burials — 13 sailors, 162 soldiers, four British airmen, two Royal Canadian Air Force and two South African — of whom 58 remain unidentified, their records destroyed during the German occupation. Brigadier Robert Tilney surrendered the island at 17:30 on 16 November 1943. Open at all hours.

  8. The castle

    The Castle of Panteli was raised by the Byzantines on an ancient acropolis in the 10th and 11th centuries and held by the Knights Hospitaller from 1314 until 1522, who added a third defensive circuit in the 15th century — four Hospitaller coats of arms remain on the walls. The Ecclesiastical Vestry of Byzantine Art, beside the church of Panagia tou Kastrou inside the walls, is open 08:30 to 13:00.

  9. Artemis honey

    Thyme honey under the Artemis label is produced by KoiSPE, the Social Cooperative of the Mental Health Sector of the Dodecanese, founded on the island in 2004 with EU LEADER+ funding. The processing laboratory at the former Italian Caserma estate handles around 60 per cent of Leros's annual honey production; pollen analysis runs at 41 per cent thyme. The cooperative employs people in recovery from the island's long psychiatric history.

  10. The Bellenis Tower

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

Anchorage Notes

  1. Lakki

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

  2. Agia Marina

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

  3. Pandeli

    Pandeli holds a small bay on the east coast, directly below the medieval castle — a fishing harbour of caïques drawn up on the shore and tavernas along the water. The bay was a landing point in the Battle of Leros in 1943; now it is one of the prettier anchorages on this side of the island, a tender’s reach from Agia Marina round the headland.

  4. Partheni

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