Spinalonga: fortress, settlement and island of the lepers

Above the still waters of Mirabello Bay rise the walls of Spinalonga. The little rocky island – it covers about eight and a half hectares and reaches barely fifty metres at its highest point – lies at the entrance to the natural anchorage of Elounda, opposite the fishing village of Plaka, from which some 750 metres of water divide it. From a distance it looks like an impregnable ship of stone, anchored for ever off the north-east coast of Crete; not without reason do the Greeks speak of the “immovable ship”.

Spinalonga is known above all as the island of the lepers – the last place in Europe where people were permanently set apart from society because of their illness. Yet the leper colony was only one chapter of its history, if the most dramatic. Before it there stood here a Venetian fortress, a refuge for insurgents and a lively small Ottoman town. Each age has left its own walls, houses, paths and memories on the island, which has been a protected archaeological site since 1976 and which Greece placed on its tentative list for World Heritage status in 2014.

From ancient Olous to Venetian Crete

Whoever held Spinalonga commanded the entrance to the sheltered anchorage; for that reason the island was used for defence even in antiquity, and the Venetian engineers later built the ruins of an ancient wall into their own works. It lay within the sphere of Olous, a flourishing ancient city whose remains – some of them now below sea level – lie near the modern village of Elounda. Through Olous ran the sea routes that linked eastern Crete with the islands of the Aegean and the ports of the Mediterranean. In ancient testimony the island appears under the name Kalydon; some historians suppose that it also served as a refuge of resistance during the Arab rule of Crete (827–961), a period in which the district as a whole went into decline.

After the Fourth Crusade Crete fell to the Republic of Venice at the beginning of the 13th century. For the Serenissima the island was far more than an overseas possession: it was the most important base on the sea route between the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean. As early as the autumn of 1206 the port is mentioned in Venetian sources. Of particular importance were the anchorage of Elounda and the neighbouring salt works, which the Venetians began to lay out in the shallow, briny water of the gulf around the middle of the 15th century and whose flat pans can still be made out on the shore today.

Was the island once a peninsula?

According to an old tradition Spinalonga was formerly joined to the neighbouring peninsula of Kolokytha by a narrow neck of land. The Venetian cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli reports that in 1526 the Venetians dug a channel through this land bridge and so made the fortified rock an island in its own right.

It may be that Spinalonga received its present form only then. The water became an additional wall: to approach the fortress unobserved, or to attack it by surprise from the land, was from then on impossible.

Where the name Spinalonga comes from

Legends cling to the name of the island as well. It is frequently traced to the Italian words spina lunga – “long thorn”. The elongated rock at the mouth of the anchorage, with its spine-like ridge as seen from Elounda, may indeed have reminded the Venetians of a point.

Another explanation tells of a linguistic misunderstanding. The Venetians may have misheard the Greek phrase στην Ολούντα – “in Olous” or “to Olous” – and gradually turned it into Spinalonga, which sounded more familiar to Italian ears; in early documents the port does in fact appear in the form Stinalonde. The name of an island in the Venetian lagoon, once called Spinalonga and known today as the Giudecca, may also have played its part.

In the 20th century the island was given the official designation Kalydon (Καλυδών), in allusion to its ancient name. It found its way into documents and maps but hardly caught on in everyday use. For local people and travellers alike the island remained Spinalonga.

The birth of a sea fortress

In the second half of the 16th century the Ottoman Empire extended its influence in the eastern Mediterranean ever further. After the loss of Cyprus in 1571 it was clear to the Venetians that Crete might be the next target, and they began to fortify the island’s most important ports and bays. In 1574 the Provveditore Generale Giacomo Foscarini sent engineers to survey the rock at the mouth of the Elounda anchorage.

The great building works on Spinalonga took place between 1579 and 1586. On 15 June 1579 the Provveditore Luca Michiel laid the foundation stone, which bore the name of the Doge Nicolò da Ponte. The design is associated with the military engineers Genese Bressani, who had been engaged for the task in 1578, and Latino Orsini, the commander who inspected the works in 1584. It was decided not to build a single fort on the summit but a ring of fortifications along the shore; in a second phase, from 1584, a further line of defence was added along the rocky ridge above. The builders applied the bastioned front, then the most modern system, and adapted it skilfully to the uneven, rocky ground. Instead of the 25,000 ducats originally estimated, the work cost in the end some 38,000.

The walls follow the outline of the island, and the defences are stepped one above another on several levels. Bastions and semicircular wall towers made it possible to sweep the approaches from the sea with crossfire. Inside lay barracks, storehouses, churches, service buildings, a powder magazine and cisterns for collecting rainwater. The island had no springs of its own – in the event of a siege the store of water could decide the fate of the garrison.

The Cretan War and the last Venetian bulwark

In 1645 the Cretan War broke out between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. It lasted almost a quarter of a century and became one of the gravest conflicts in the island’s history. The further the Ottoman troops advanced, the more refugees from the lost territories Spinalonga took in. Cretan insurgents too, the Chainides, who carried on the resistance, found refuge here.

In 1669, after a siege of more than twenty years, Candia fell – the Heraklion of today. Almost the whole of Crete came under Ottoman rule, but Venice kept the three island fortresses of Spinalonga, Souda and Gramvousa. For nearly half a century more the banner of St Mark flew over Spinalonga.

In 1715 Ottoman troops laid siege to the fortress, which had been armed with some 35 cannon since at least 1630. The siege lasted three months. After the capitulation in October the Venetian garrison marched out under the terms agreed, and the six hundred or so remaining inhabitants were carried off into captivity. With that the Venetian chapter of the island’s history came to an end.

An Ottoman town behind fortress walls

After 1715 Muslim families settled within the fortress, alongside an Ottoman garrison of roughly three hundred men – fortress guards, marines, armourers, gunners and bombardiers. The new inhabitants converted Venetian buildings into dwellings and workshops and often raised their houses on old stone foundations. The Ottoman authorities also used the island at times as a place of banishment. By 1830 some eighty Muslim families were living on the rock.

In the 19th century the settlement grew rapidly: behind the fortress walls merchants and seamen felt safer than in many coastal villages, and after the Cretan revolt of 1866 more Muslim families moved here in search of protection. In 1881 the count was 1,112 inhabitants. Spinalonga had become the largest Muslim trading place on Mirabello Bay, with some two hundred houses and about twenty-five shops and workshops.

The surviving two-storey buildings with their symmetrical façades, wooden oriels and large door openings recall the time when a lively eastern Mediterranean small town pulsed inside a military fortress. A mosque was part of it, as were coffee houses and a small bazaar along the main street.

Cretan uprisings and the decline of the Ottoman settlement

Towards the end of the 19th century the familiar order on Spinalonga began to break down. The Cretan uprisings, waning Ottoman power and the intervention of the European Great Powers led the Muslim population to leave the island little by little.

The year 1897 was especially tense. A fresh uprising widened into an international crisis in which Great Britain, France, Russia and Italy intervened. They stationed troops on Crete and divided the island into zones of responsibility. The region of Lasithi, with Mirabello Bay and Spinalonga, fell within the French zone.

After the withdrawal of the Ottoman army and the founding of the autonomous Cretan State, more and more inhabitants left Spinalonga; most had gone by the end of 1898, and the last of them, a few smugglers among them, held on only until 1903. Houses and shops emptied, and the once busy trading place turned gradually into a fortress fallen silent.

The Cretan State and union with Greece

In 1898 the Ottoman troops left Crete. Formally the island still acknowledged the suzerainty of the Sultan, but in fact it became an autonomous state under the protection of the European powers. At its head stood Prince George of Greece, a son of King George I. Crete received its own government, a parliament, laws, administrative authorities, a currency of its own and a gendarmerie.

The majority of the Orthodox, Greek-speaking population stood for Enosis, union with Greece. In 1905 the supporters of Eleftherios Venizelos rose in the village of Therisso and demanded political reforms and more resolute steps towards union.

In 1908 the Cretan deputies unilaterally declared union with Greece, but international recognition became possible only after the Balkan Wars. On 1 December 1913 the Greek flag was ceremonially raised at the Firkas fortress in Chania.

The founding of the leper colony

On 21 May 1903 the Assembly of the Cretan State resolved to set up a leper colony on Spinalonga; the law provided for the compulsory confinement of all the island’s sufferers, and the institution was given the name of St Panteleimon. In October 1904 the first patients arrived, 251 of them. There had been lepers on Crete before; many lived at Meskinia near Heraklion – in poverty, almost without medical help and under constant social pressure.

At the beginning of the 20th century leprosy aroused an almost superstitious dread. Isolation seemed to the authorities the only way of protecting the population. Spinalonga lent itself to this by its remoteness, its fortress walls and the empty houses of the Ottoman settlement.

After the union of Crete with Greece, sufferers from other parts of the country were sent to the island as well. For decades Spinalonga became an enforced home for hundreds of exiles – in 1935 some three hundred patients were living here – and it entered history as the island of the lepers. It was the last leper colony of its kind in Europe, and it was not closed until 1957.

Dante’s Gate

New arrivals entered the settlement through a stone tunnel which later acquired the name Dante’s Gate. It is associated with the line from the “Divine Comedy”: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Whether such an inscription ever existed is not known, but the tradition preserves the feeling of those who crossed the threshold of the leper colony for the first time. Behind the gate, home, family and the life they had led were left behind. Right beside it lay the disinfection building, in which newcomers and incoming goods were treated.

The first decades of isolation

The sick were housed in the dwellings of the former Ottoman settlement. Many buildings were half ruined; water, medicines and the simplest comforts were lacking. There was no running water, and people depended on the rainwater in the old cisterns. The inhabitants were forbidden to leave the island of their own accord, and state support was scarcely enough for the barest necessities. In the early years there were repeated attempts at escape and suicides; one inhabitant later described Spinalonga as a filthy slough in which one slowly decayed without hope.

Food and water were brought from the mainland. Plaka played a special part: its boatmen ferried people and goods, traders supplied the sick, and some villagers helped to keep everyday life on the island going. Gradually the situation improved. From 1920 chaulmoogra oil, then the only remedy on offer, was given to the patients; in 1925 the physician Emmanouil Grammatikakis took charge; in 1927 the French Nobel laureate Charles Nicolle visited the island and sent medicines after his return; from 1928 living conditions were systematically bettered, and the former mosque was converted into an infirmary with a dispensary.

Even under the harshest conditions people made themselves at home in their houses, practised trades, grew plants in tiny yards and opened shops. Friendships were formed on the island, people married and founded families – more than 170 marriages are recorded over the life of the colony – and many a healthy wife followed her sick husband voluntarily into exile. If a child was born healthy, it could be separated from its parents and given to be brought up outside Spinalonga.

The church of St Panteleimon

One of the spiritual centres of the community was the church of St Panteleimon (Agios Panteleimonas); the island also had churches of St Nicholas and St George. Stories have been handed down of a priest who served on the island although he did not himself suffer from leprosy. He mixed with the sick and gave them communion without shrinking from contact.

According to tradition the priest was in no hurry after the service to wash the communion spoon, and showed by this that he regarded his congregation neither as unclean nor as outcast. For the inhabitants there was more mercy in this simple gesture than in many official speeches. The marriages permitted on the island were also solemnised in the church.

Epaminondas Remoundakis

On 11 March 1936 a young man of twenty-two, Epaminondas Remoundakis, landed on Spinalonga. He came from the Sitia district, where he was born on 4 August 1914 in the village of Agia Triada, the sixth child and fifth son of his family, and he was a third-year law student. The disease had taken hold of him while he was still a schoolboy – it was diagnosed when he was twelve, and treatment at the Pasteur Institute in Athens seemed at first to help – without leaving any visible mark. In 1931, faced with compulsory confinement, he slipped away by boat via the islet of Koufonisi to Athens, where he passed the entrance examination for the law faculty of the university. When his illness was discovered he was arrested by the police, in October 1935, and placed in the hospital for infectious diseases at Agia Varvara (St Barbara) outside Athens; soon afterwards he decided to go to the island, where his sister Maria, who had the same disease, was already living.

Remoundakis would not settle for resignation and neglect. With his energetic help the patients founded the “Brotherhood of the Sick of Spinalonga – St Panteleimon”, named after the physician-saint to whom the island’s church is dedicated: an association run by the sick themselves, which pressed for better sanitation, better supplies and proper medical care. Within a month it had been recognised by the courts, and 160 islanders were counted among its founding members. Together with other young, educated patients of progressive outlook, Remoundakis left a lasting stamp on the community. The Brotherhood also lobbied for things that the authorities had long refused the sick as a matter of course – the right to marry, to keep small businesses and to open a café.

How the islanders transformed their island

At the Brotherhood’s urging the lanes were swept and the houses repaired. A sanitary service was set up, along with a laundry and rooms for disinfection. Workshops appeared, a barber’s shop, a coffee house, a library and common rooms; even a dentist now came over to the island regularly. Between 1937 and 1939 new hostels were built for the patients, and in 1938–39 the path that circles the island was laid out. To make it, the Brotherhood obtained the government’s permission in 1938 to pull down stretches of the old fortifications, so that those who had difficulty walking could at last get round the rock on a level track. An inscription still pays tribute to the Brotherhood and its president, Epaminondas Remoundakis.

Loudspeakers were fixed along the main street to carry announcements and music – classical music among it, on which Remoundakis was particularly keen. The island had its own generator, and so had electric light at a time when many of the villages round about still had none. There were plays and film shows, a school was kept going, and a small newspaper was produced.

The lanes were whitewashed, curtains hung in the houses and flowers stood at the windows. People worked, quarrelled, celebrated, fell in love and helped their neighbours; Remoundakis himself married on the island, his bride a fellow patient named Anastasia. The island of lepers had become a small town whose inhabitants refused to regard themselves as dead to the rest of the world.

Spinalonga under the Occupation

During the Second World War Crete was occupied by German and Italian troops. From 1941 no further patients were sent to the island, and its supply from the mainland, never generous, deteriorated dramatically: food and medicines ran short, and a good many of the inhabitants died of malnutrition. Yet the dread of leprosy drew an invisible line around the island which even the occupiers did not care to cross without good reason. Remoundakis is said to have lost much of his voice in these years, in the course of a desperate exchange with Italian soldiers.

Many stories cling to this period. It was said that the islanders listened in secret to the broadcasts from London and Cairo and heard the news sooner than the people of occupied Crete; the director of the institution, Dr Grammatikakis – the physician who had been attending the patients since 1925 – is said to have passed the forbidden wireless bulletins on to the sick. There was talk of boats slipping across from Plaka by night with food, and of people who tried to swim to the mainland in search of something to eat. Some of them were shot by the Germans on the shore at Plaka.

Some of these tales have hardened into legend with the passing years, and it is now barely possible to tell what is documented from what has been handed down by word of mouth. But they catch the mood of the war years well enough: hunger, isolation, and the island’s constant dependence on its link with the shore opposite.

A cure, and the hope of going home

The turning point in the treatment of leprosy came in the 1940s. Sulphone drugs such as Promin, which were able to suppress the bacillus, entered medical practice. Promin had first been tried on leprosy patients in 1941 by Guy Henry Faget at the National Leprosarium at Carville in Louisiana, and by 1946 his results were being reported around the world; the drug, given by injection, breaks down in the body into dapsone, which is still used today. On Spinalonga the new medicines were first administered in 1948, with impressive results, and from then on the rules of isolation began to loosen and patients could be granted short periods of leave. For the islanders the remedy meant more than better health: for the first time there was a real prospect of leaving the island. In some cases it even turned out that the person had never had leprosy at all.

Treatment could not, however, wipe out at a stroke the effects of years of illness. In some patients the nerves were already damaged, the eyesight impaired or movement restricted; Remoundakis himself had gone blind in 1947, the year before the drugs arrived. Nor did the prejudices of the world outside vanish overnight. In their years of isolation many had lost their house, their property and all contact with their relations. In 1953 the patients went on hunger strike to claim their rights; in 1955 a legislative decree abolished the regime of compulsory isolation.

The closing of the leper colony

As effective treatment became widely available, the patients were moved from 1956 onwards to the hospital at Agia Varvara near Athens, or went back to ordinary life on the mainland. In 1957 the last twenty or thirty of the sick were taken to Athens; the colony, which had received its first 251 patients in October 1904, was closed for good, and the island fell derelict. Only a priest, Chrysanthos Katsoulogiannakis, stayed on until 1962 to hold the memorial services that Orthodox custom requires for the dead in the years after burial.

Epaminondas Remoundakis was transferred to Agia Varvara with his wife Tasia. By then he had already lost his sight, but he went on campaigning against discrimination towards those who had come through Hansen’s disease. Later he dictated his memoirs – medical students took them down – and they were published after his death under the title “Eagle Without Wings” (Αητός χωρίς φτερά). He and his wife lived at Agia Varvara to the end of his life; he died there on 24 January 1978, aged sixty-three.

Spinalonga after 1957

Once the institution had closed, the houses, workshops and sick-rooms stood empty. For a time people preferred not to be reminded of the island: the fear of the disease and the shame at the years of enforced isolation were still too strong. A good deal of what the patients had built was pulled down in the late 1970s, as though the stain could be removed along with the walls.

In the mid-1970s Spinalonga was placed under protection as a monument, and in 1976 it was declared an archaeological site. Research, the conservation of the buildings and restoration work followed, and since 2000 the island has been formally open to visitors; today the Lasithi antiquities service looks after the Venetian fortress, the Ottoman settlement and the buildings of the leper colony alike. In 2013 the bones from the patients’ graves, which had been repeatedly disturbed, were gathered into an ossuary; later campaigns have consolidated the south-western wall and, in 2023, added exhibition rooms accessible to all. Greece put the island forward for UNESCO World Heritage status in 2014, as an outstanding example of fortress architecture and as a place of remembrance of human exclusion and resilience. It is now the most visited site in Crete after Knossos.

Victoria Hislop and the novel “The Island”

Spinalonga owes its new fame to “The Island”, the first novel of the British writer Victoria Hislop, published in June 2005. At its heart is the story of several generations of one family whose fate is bound up with Plaka and the leper colony: a young Englishwoman, Alexis Fielding, travels to Crete and learns from an old family friend, Fotini, what her mother had always kept from her – the history of her great-grandmother Eleni and of the sisters Maria and Anna.

The novel is not a documentary chronicle: its characters are invented, and the real historical circumstances form the backdrop to a family drama. The book became an international bestseller, was translated into some twenty-five languages and won its author the Newcomer of the Year prize at the British Book Awards of 2007. It introduced millions of readers to the story of Spinalonga.

The Greek television series “Το Νησί”

In 2010 the Greek channel Mega broadcast a twenty-six-part adaptation of the novel, “Το Νησί” (To Nisi, “The Island”), the first episode going out on 11 October. Filming had begun in December 2009 and took place in Plaka, on Spinalonga, in upper Elounda and in Agios Nikolaos; with a budget of some four million euros it was the most expensive production Greek television had yet undertaken. Victoria Hislop took an active part in the project, and the screenwriter Mirella Papaoikonomou enlarged the plot of the book with new characters and storylines.

The series became a cultural event in Greece. On screen the lanes, boats and houses of Spinalonga came back to life, the island’s story fixed itself in the mind of a new generation, and the interest of travellers grew markedly: a survey of 2016 found that more than a fifth of the island’s visitors had come because of the book or the series.

Werner Herzog’s “Last Words”

A place of its own in the cultural history of the island belongs to Werner Herzog’s short film “Last Words” (Letzte Worte), made in 1968. It runs to just thirteen minutes, is spoken in Greek, and was shot in two days on Crete and Spinalonga while Herzog was at work on his first feature, “Signs of Life”; the camera was in the hands of Thomas Mauch, and the editing took a single day. Its hero is an old musician who, so it is said, was removed by force from the deserted island of Spinalonga. Now he lives on Crete, plays in a bar at night and repeats that he will never speak another word.

The leading part was taken by the Cretan lyra player Antonis Papadakis, known as Kareklas, with Lefteris Daskalakis accompanying him on the bouzouki. In the film the story of the last inhabitant hovers on the border between rumour, invention and play-acting. The characters repeat the same sentences over and over, in long takes, until the words have all but lost their meaning – and the silence of the hero, who in fact says more than anyone else, becomes more eloquent than everything the others have to tell.

There are stories that cannot be explained in plain speech. Sometimes one can only repeat them until the words turn into music – or play them on the lyra, as Herzog’s hero does.

How to explore Spinalonga today

Spinalonga reveals itself a step at a time. Look first at the walls and bastions, which follow the lie of the rocky ground. Then at the houses of the Ottoman settlement along the narrow lanes. After that, turn to the hospital buildings, the disinfection room, the church and the places where the sick went about their daily lives. Finally the circular path that the islanders laid out for themselves leads round the outside of the walls, past the small cemetery and its ossuary, with wide views across the bay to the Kolokytha peninsula.

In this way the island ceases to be the mere stage set of a single tragic legend. What takes shape before us is a place used over the centuries by soldiers, merchants, seamen, refugees, families, and people banished here because of their illness.

The name “island of lepers” has kept its emotional force, and recalls a time when a diagnosis was as good as a sentence. But behind that name one has to see the individual men and women – with their trades, their quirks, their loves, their faith and their hope. Society shut them away behind fortress walls, but it could not take from them the will to live and to be heard.