Spinalonga – the Venetian fortress and the island of the lepers

The fortress of Spinalonga

Introduction

Before you leave Elounda, take the chance to see one of the finest pieces of military engineering in the eastern Mediterranean, and one of the most affecting historical sites in Greece: the Venetian fortress on the islet of Spinalonga. Architectural skill and the accumulated layers of many centuries give the place an atmosphere found nowhere else on Crete. The island is tiny – some 85 stremmata, or about 8.5 hectares, rising to roughly 50 metres at its highest point – and lies at the northern mouth of the bay of Elounda, commanding the entrance to one of the best natural anchorages on the island. Only about 750 metres of water separate it from the village of Plaka on the mainland shore. Its official name is Kalydon (Καλυδών); the name Spinalonga, Italian for “long thorn”, is commonly explained as a Venetian mishearing of the Cretan phrase “stin Elounda” – “at Elounda” – which to Italian ears became “spina longa”.

How the fortress came to be built

The island was already fortified in antiquity, probably in the Hellenistic period, to protect the city of Olous on the opposite shore, and it was on the remains of that ancient stronghold that the Venetians later raised their own. Venetian engineers surveyed the rock in 1574; four years later Genese Bressani was engaged to draw up the plans, and in 1579 the provveditore generale Luca Michiel laid the foundation stone. According to the inscription over the entrance, the work lasted from 1579 to 1586, with the defences along the crest strengthened in 1584. Spinalonga was a showpiece of the military architecture of the Republic of Venice. After the loss of Cyprus to the Ottomans it was intended as an impregnable bastion and an emblem of power and independence: it was to shield merchant shipping from pirates and from the Turkish fleet, and at the same time to guard the salt pans of the bay, whose salt was traded as far as central Europe. The design, by the engineers Genese Bressani and Latino Orsini, followed the modern bastioned system. Two circuits of wall – one along the shoreline, a second higher up on the rocky spine – are joined by two cross-walls, and among the most powerful works are the crescent-shaped bastions known as the Michiel and the Moceniga. In its prime the fortress mounted 35 cannon. The building stone, a hard limestone and a soft sandstone, was quarried on the eastern side of the island and on the neighbouring peninsula. Among the structures that survive are vaulted cisterns, a garrison building, a powder magazine and the little church of Agios Nikolaos.

Under Ottoman rule

The fortress did what was asked of it. When Crete passed to the Ottoman Empire in 1669, after the fall of Candia (Heraklion), Spinalonga remained in Venetian hands together with Souda and Gramvousa, and it was not until 1715 that it was handed over to the Turks by agreement. Muslim families then settled here, most of them seamen and traders. In the late 18th century the harbour was granted trading privileges; some 80 Muslim families were living on the island by 1830, and around the middle of the 19th century Spinalonga was a lively commercial settlement with shops, houses and a mosque. The Christian uprisings at the end of the century, and the end of Ottoman authority on Crete in 1898, persuaded most of the inhabitants to emigrate, and the island fell empty.

The leper colony (1903–1957)

On 30 May 1903 the Cretan State, which had made the isolation of leprosy sufferers compulsory, resolved to turn the deserted island into a colony for them, and on 13 October 1904 the first 251 patients were brought across. They moved into the abandoned houses of the former inhabitants; further buildings were added later, above all in the 1930s, to take in more patients. After the union of Crete with Greece in 1913 the sick arrived from all over the country, and the institution was given the status of an international leprosarium. Those sent here – the disease and its stigma robbed many of their faces, their sight and their limbs – were entirely cut off from the outside world. Not until 1925 did a resident doctor, Dr Grammatikakis, bring regular medical care; even so, doctors and staff left the island before sunset, and the monthly allowance barely covered food and medicine. Many healthy children followed their sick parents into exile, and others were born on the island. In September 1927 the French Nobel laureate Charles Nicolle visited the colony, and a cameraman who accompanied him filmed harrowing scenes of the patients’ daily life.

A community behind the walls

In spite of everything, a surprisingly ordinary life took shape behind the fortress walls. There were shops, a kafenion and a barber; the patients tended small gardens; marriages took place, although they were officially forbidden, and children were born. The turning point came in the 1930s with Epaminondas Remoundakis, a law student who had contracted leprosy and been banished to the island. In 1936 he founded a Brotherhood of the Sick, and through it won a series of improvements: whitewash against dirt and infection, electric light in the lanes, dental care, a theatre and a cinema. In 1938 the residents obtained permission to lay out a path around the whole perimeter of the island, which meant breaching part of the Venetian wall. Remoundakis campaigned tirelessly for the dignity of his fellow sufferers, who endured particular hardship during the wartime occupation of 1941–1945. From 1947 the hieromonk Chrysanthos Koutsoulogiannakis, of the Faneromeni Monastery near Ierapetra, served as priest at the church of Agios Panteleimon, which had been built in 1709, in the last years of Venetian rule. He shook the patients by the hand, visited them in their houses, and stayed on after the colony had closed to tend the graves – the last inhabitant of Spinalonga, until failing health obliged him to leave in 1962.

The end of the colony and the island today

From 1948 effective drugs against Hansen’s disease were available, and many patients were cured. The residents went on hunger strike in 1953 over their conditions, and the formal rules of isolation were lifted in 1955. In 1957 the leprosarium was closed, and the last twenty or so patients were taken to a hospital at Agia Varvara, near Athens. During the 1960s and 1970s the buildings suffered from neglect, from looting and from the first waves of tourists; the island was declared an archaeological site in 1976, and between 1997 and 2005 fortress and settlement were carefully restored. In 2013 the human remains from the cemetery were gathered into an ossuary. Spinalonga became known around the world through Victoria Hislop’s novel “The Island”, published in 2005, which has been translated into more than 35 languages and has sold millions of copies; it was filmed for Greek television as “To Nisi” in 2010. Long before that, Werner Herzog had shot his short film “Last Words” here in 1968. The island is uninhabited today, yet in high season several thousand visitors cross to it every day, making it the most visited site on Crete after Knossos.