Limnos

Limnos is the working farm island of the northern Aegean. The interior is open, treeless and surprisingly flat for a Greek island. Its volcanic soil produces some of the country’s better wheat and a small quantity of distinctive sweet wine. The coast is a run of long beaches between low headlands. A Greek air force base in the centre has done more than anything to keep the island from heavy tourist development. Most weeks of the summer, Greek visitors outnumber foreign ones.

Myrina, the capital, sits beneath a Byzantine and Genoese castle on a volcanic headland between two bays. Climb to the castle at sunset for the view across the strait to Mount Athos; deer still wander the upper walls. Below, two pebble beaches flank the headland. The lower town is a quiet grid of stone houses, with a few good fish tavernas and a market on Friday mornings.

Poliochni, on the eastern coast, is one of the oldest town-like settlements yet found in Europe. Its earliest layers date from the early third millennium BC, before Troy across the strait. Its well-preserved street grid points to a level of civic organisation that surprised the Italian archaeologists who began digging there in 1930. The museum on site is small; the site itself is the reason to go.

Visitors from Australia and New Zealand come to Limnos in real numbers, and they come for Mudros. Its deep harbour on the eastern coast was the main staging point for the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. A small Commonwealth war cemetery on its shore is visited each April around Anzac Day. In the eastern interior, the local Muscat of Alexandria grape has been grown since antiquity. A modest revival in recent decades has brought back wines that Aristotle mentioned in his writings. Three nights is enough.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Aegean Airlines and Sky Express fly ATR turboprops from Athens to Limnos National Airport “Hephaestus” (LXS), about an hour in the air: A3260 and A3266 on Aegean, GQ320 and GQ322 on Sky Express. By sea, Blue Star Ferries runs the line from Piraeus through Syros, Mykonos, Patmos, Ikaria, Vathi, Chios and Mytilene to Limnos and Kavala, calling at Myrina.

  2. The address

    Varos Village Hotel & Residences stands in the inland village of Varos, at the centre of the island, a settlement Kostas Liaskas began restoring in 2010 in volcanic stone and the local Lemnia Terra clay. The traditional residences are converted from the old kafenio (the village coffee house), the maternity clinic and the grain and cotton warehouses. It is the considered address for guests who want the island rather than a beach hotel.

  3. Hrysafi Dairy

    Kalathaki Limnou is a PDO white brined cheese (protected designation of origin), hand-pressed into the small wicker baskets that give it its shape, and five small dairies make it on the island. Hrysafis, at Karpasi, is the family producer to send a client to, and its cheese is the one to bring back. It is made from raw sheep’s milk with up to 30 per cent goat’s milk.

  4. Limnos Organic Wines

    Yiannis Savvoglou and Pantelis Tsivolas founded the estate at Kaspakas in 2002, certified organic across roughly 650 acres of Muscat of Alexandria and Limnio, the island vine Hesiod and Aristotle wrote about. The winery stands in the Mavrampelia growing area, about 2 kilometres outside Myrina. It is open for tastings daily from 11am to 2pm, and in the afternoons and at weekends by appointment.

  5. Mudros and ANZAC Day

    The East Mudros Military Cemetery took its First World War burials from April 1915 to September 1919, 885 Commonwealth dead, 86 of them unidentified, and in 1921 the graves of 29 Russians who died in the evacuation of Novorossisk. Portianos, on the west side of Mudros Bay, holds 347 more, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission keeps both. The Lemnos Remembrance Trail, an Australian and Greek project across more than a dozen sites, is observed each year around ANZAC Day, 25 April.

  6. Poliochni, by phase

    The Italian School of Archaeology at Athens began digging Poliochni, on the east coast, in 1930 under Alessandro Della Seta and resumed in 1951 under Luigi Bernabò Brea. He divided the long settlement into seven periods named by colour (Black, Blue, Green, Red, Yellow, Brown and Mycenaean) and identified the assembly room he called the Parliament. The museum on site is small; the site itself is the point.

  7. The theatre at Hephaestia

    On the northern shore at Hephaestia, the late classical theatre was restored from 2000 to 2004, and in 2010 Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex was staged there for the first time in roughly 2,500 years. The orchestra and the three-tiered seating are carved into the natural hillside above the sea, with room for around 200 in the main bowl.

  8. Giannakaros at Kotsinas

    Nikolas Giannakarou runs the fish taverna on the harbour at Kotsinas, the small fishing village in Pournia Bay 2 kilometres north of Repanidi on the northern coast, with his sister Alexandra looking after the room. The menu is fresh-caught fish and seafood, with salads and vegetables from the family orchard, and the seafood pasta is made with flomari, the island’s own pasta. The kitchen is worth the drive from Myrina.

  9. The castle

    The Byzantines built the castle of Myrina in the 12th century; the Venetians rebuilt the walls from 1207 to 1214, the Byzantines took it back in 1278, the Genoese held it from 1453 and the Ottomans took it in 1462. At roughly 144,000 square metres, with triple curtain walls and 14 towers, it is the largest castle in the Aegean. Count Orlov badly damaged the walls in the Russo-Turkish siege of 1770.

  10. The Archaeological Museum

    The Archaeological Museum of Limnos, in a neoclassical house on Navarchou Kountourioti at Romeikos Gialos, reopened with a new permanent exhibition in August 2025. The first floor covers the island’s prehistoric civilisation and the second runs from the Late Bronze Age to the Byzantine period, with finds from Poliochni, Myrina, Koukonisi, Kavirio and Ouriakos. It opens 8.30am to 3.30pm and closes on Tuesdays.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Myrina

    Myrina, the capital and main port, stands on a bay on the west coast that a rocky promontory splits in two, with the Venetian castle on the headland above, the Roman Shore to its north and the Turkish Shore to its south. The caiques lie in the harbour below the walls. A yacht ties up at the island’s one town of any size, below the castle that is lit at night.

  2. Moudros

    Moudros stands on the great bay in the east, a gulf so large that the Allied fleet used it as its base for the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, under Admiral Wemyss. Aboard HMS Agamemnon in the bay, the Armistice of Mudros ended the war with the Ottomans in October 1918. A yacht lies in this harbour, the second port of the island, on its northeastern shore.

  3. Kotsinas

    Kotsinas has a small harbour on the north coast, below the castle that the 18-year-old Maroula is said to have defended in 1478. When the Ottomans besieged it in the war with Venice, she took up her dead father’s sword and led the garrison, a story set down in a poem two centuries later. A yacht lies off the fishing quay under the fortress hill.

  4. Nea Koutali

    Nea Koutali, on the southern shore of Moudros bay, was settled by sponge divers and fishermen from Koutali, a diving town whose men worked the whole Mediterranean. From the sea floor they raised ancient amphoras (clay storage jars) and anchors from Corinth, Chios, Thasos, Rhodes and beyond, now the collection of the local museum. A yacht lies off the town.

Mythology

  1. Hephaestus

    In one account in the Iliad, Hephaestus falls all day after Zeus throws him from Olympus, and at sunset he lands on Lemnos, where the Sintians care for him. Apollodorus makes this same landing the cause of his injured legs.

  2. Hypnos

    In the Iliad, Hera meets Hypnos on Lemnos and asks him to put Zeus to sleep. He agrees there, but only after Hera promises him Pasithea as his wife.

  3. Hypsipyle

    Hypsipyle rules Lemnos when the Argo arrives. She has secretly saved her father, Thoas, from the killings on the island, and she leads the women of Lemnos as they decide how to receive Jason and his crew.

  4. Orion

    On Lemnos, the blinded Orion reaches Hephaestus and receives the guide Cedalion, whom he carries on his shoulders towards the east. Lucian describes Hephaestus on Lemnos watching as the rising sun heals Orion’s sight.

  5. Philoctetes

    The Iliad places the wounded Philoctetes on Lemnos after the Achaeans leave him there. Sophocles sets his whole play Philoctetes beside the archer’s cave on the island, where Odysseus and Neoptolemus come back for him and the bow of Heracles.

  6. The Mysteries of the Kabeiroi

    Strabo says the Kabeiroi were worshipped at Lemnos and Imbros more than anywhere else, and their sanctuary on the island stands at Cape Chloe, outside the walls of Hephaestia, the city named for the god every ancient account makes their father. The Kabeirion there was in use from the eighth century BC until late antiquity. It was built on two terraces cut into a hillside that drops into the sea.

  7. The Voyage of the Argo

    In Apollonius, the Argo calls first at Limnos, where the women have killed every man on the island and take the crew as lovers under their queen, Hypsipyle. Heracles alone refuses to go ashore, and he rebukes the others for staying so long to plough the soil of Limnos when they should be sailing on.