Lesvos

The island of harmony and dream

Lesvos, renowned since antiquity, is the island of harmony and dream. The flower of an eternal spring set on the blue waters of the Aegean, avision that opens wide its modest beaty to the horizon, offering an invitation to love and promise. An ethereal sudstance you would say, made from the very breath of God. Matter that is moulded of a light made up of soft tones and sweet shadowing which emerges from the embrace of the sea and poised there achieves its equilibrium with water, in the melding of myth and truth, contemplation and reality. As if the seasons had paused caught up in a feeling of responsibility and awe in the face of such beauty and then left this land pristine where the gods of joy and sun were worsipped and Sapphicgrief was heard in the incomparable “Aeolian melody”.

Thus, it is just us back then when the Tritons cavorted on the serene shores, when Cupids roamed in the brilliant gerdens with flowers woven in their hair, when youth, in the figures of  Daphnis and Chloe, spun the most tender tale of love that time has ever known. In this land beaty, the courtesy of true feeling, clear reasoning, passion for creation and longing for life cannot help but be in eternal bloom.

No discord. Even in the sheer cliffs plunging to the sea and the enormous masses of rock in the interior, in the dry stone walls and the ancient lava along the slopes, you will encounter a gentle pulse of tameness, a glow of meekness which gives you a feeling of intimacy, which draws near you, and enters you as a polite and welcoming merging. Here is where song and lyric poetry, philosofical reflection and the arts first flowered, as ancient finds have shown. Homer mentions Lesvos as the sea of Makareos, the son of  Helios, the most famed of the mythical kings. The poet Palamas said Lesvos was a temple to beaty and the novelist Myrivilis thought of it as a Flower – bedecked boat sailing between Greece and the Orient. Lesvos is a true princess of the deep blue Aegean. A hallucination. A myth. A truth. A paradise of serenity.

Lesvos is the third largest island of Greece and has a long history that goes back more than 3.000 years. It has been the birthplace of famous people, such as the poets Sappho and Alcaeos, Arion the Guitarist, and Pittacus, one of the seven wise men of ancient Greece. A tradition that even continues today and gives the island that distinctive atmosphere which makes it so different from the rest.

Sappho’s reputation as a lover of her own sex, has given the word “Lesbian” an international currency. Her reputation is based on some of the fragments of her poetry: “I was in love with you once, Atthis, long ago…”

Rich in olives and fish, the island has an economic balance rare in the Aegean and because of its relative prosperity the island is very easy for travelers to reach even in the quiet months of winter. By air, one can get to Lesvos from Athens five times a day and from Salonica seven times a week. By Ferry-boat, one can reach Lesvos every day from Piraeus, and from Salonica on a less frequent schedule.