Cretan-homes, Crete property estate agents

Spinalonga

by Ann Lisney

Although we had previously visited Elounda in the east of Crete, we had never been out to the former leper colony island of Spinalonga. However, having read the excellent novel “The Island” by Victoria Hislop, Spinalonga shot up to the top of our list of places to visit.

As the nearby village of Plaka also features in the book, we decided to base ourselves there. It is a tiny place with a handful of tavernas, a mini market, a few cottages and a few apartments to rent. Many of the cottages seem to be used as weekend homes by absent owners, so during the week it is very quiet.

You can see Spinalonga from everywhere in Plaka. Your eyes are drawn to it time and time again. It floats offshore like some huge fortified cruise ship, and as the light changes during the day various parts of it are thrown into shadow or sharper relief. Individual buildings are clearly visible from the village, and it is only too easy to imagine the agony of standing on the shore, looking across the narrow stretch of water to where a loved one is confined for ever, destined to die there of a horrible and painful disease.

Having heard that the larger tourist boats to Spinalonga run from Aghios Nicholaos and from Elounda, we decided to take the earliest boat direct from Plaka, to try and be ahead of the crowds. So, at 9.30 on a bright warm morning we left the dock at Plaka and made the short crossing to the island of the damned.

All was silence when we arrived, and we moved quietly up towards the old Venetian tunnel which gives access to the leper colony. The stone forming the entrance to the tunnel is bright and golden, but it turns sharply to the right, shutting out the light as you enter.  A powerful metaphor for the transition from the old carefree life to another, frightening and sinister.

Many of the first buildings you come to are former Ottoman or Venetian constructions, from the time when the island was a fortress guarding the entrance not only to the Elounda bay, but the bay of Mirabello as a whole. A small street of houses has been partly restored, with brightly coloured wooden shop fronts; one of these is a (poorly equipped) shop which sells cards or old maps of the island.  A couple of former shops display archeological finds, covering all the island’s history – not only the little section showing enamel bowls, bedpans, medicine bottles, pipettes and ancient medical equipment.

Several information boards explain the island’s importance over the years, and this is perhaps where one starts to become aware that the ‘leper connection’ is going to be very played down. For it certainly is shamefully played down. I understand that once leprosy became treatable and the sufferers here began to recover, they were sent back to their lives and the last patients left in 1957. The island seems to have been forgotten until the 1970’s, when much of the housing built by and for the lepers was knocked down by the Greek government – perhaps another case of sanitisation of unsavoury reminders of the past?

Over much of the rest of the island, there is supposed to be some restoration work in progress, although there is little sign of it except for notices prohibiting access to areas where buildings have become dangerous. It is possible, however, to walk through some of the derelict buildings and catch a glimpse of a life being lived there – here a bread oven, there a lavatory pit, over there a relic of a wooden staircase leading to a worm-eaten upstairs floor. The very stones exude the atmosphere, and in the quiet of the morning it was possible to lean back on a stone wall and picture the village street as it must have existed, peopled with inhabitants in the various stages of their illness – from the new arrivals, appearing hale and hearty, to those moving agonisingly slowly on misshapen limbs.

One of the remaining two-storey buildings was the former hospital. Everything that could be stripped out of the building has been taken away – all that remains are a few sun-bleached shutters shading rooms that must have been witness to appalling pain and suffering. It is still possible to work out which must have been the kitchen area, which the lavatories, and which the treatment or individual rooms for the patients. The access from the main path was blocked off by wire to discourage entry, but a more careful look around the back of the building led to a another entrance where it was possible to creep quietly in and have a better look at what was there.

Another memorable and poignant area is the leper graveyard. This covers a surprisingly small area, until one realises that the dead must surely have been placed into what to all intents and purposes was a communal grave. If the small notice “Leper graveyard” had not been on the wall, it would not have been obvious what it had been. There are no memorials, no religious artefacts, no book of the dead – nothing to remind us that hundreds and hundreds of people came here to exist as the living dead until they ended up under one of the concrete slabs that now cover the area.

We had now been on the island for an hour and a half, and in the distance we could hear the approach of the tourist boats from further down the bay. Disco music blared out vying with over-loud commentary in fifteen different languages. The peace of the island was about to be shattered again, and the atmosphere destroyed. It was about to be turned into a theme park.

While we waited for our tiny boat to take us back across the water, we moved away from the crowds and sat in the shade of a tamarisk tree at the water’s edge, looking back towards Plaka. How near it was – and yet how far away.