Or, welcome to your winter home

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There is a sense of real-ness about Mytilini that is refreshing. It’s not a tourist town, as much as it is the capitol of the most beautiful island in the Aegean and is flooded with tourists in the summer like any other beautiful island in the Aegean. It is home to the only airport on the island, and a steady stream of ferries, even in winter, provides more options for locals and tourists alike. Historically Lesvos has been a major olive producer, and the Ermou, or market street, developed in response to the needs of growers and buyers, with buildings dedicated to olive grading, storing, pressing, and selling. Lesvos still has the most olive trees per capita than any other Greek island, and we can attest the olives are delicious.

Lesvos, with its proximity to Turkey, also has a history of ping pong governments, with control going back and forth between the Hellenic and Ottoman regimes until 1922. The Mytilini castle is a visual representation of this. Our castle guide proudly pointed out the sections of the castle walls that were constructed during Hellenic rule, with their straight blocks and careful placement, as opposed to those sections constructed during Ottoman eras, which are chaotic, with haphazard stone placement and little attention to stone size or shape. That bias out of the way, the castle remains are beautiful, and stand on the headland in front of the city facing Turkey just 8 kilometers away.

The last regime change was in 1922, when the Turks, who were the victors, forced all Greeks to return to Mytlini who had, over the course of many years, emigrated to Turkey and established their lives there. At the same time all Turks who had done the same in Lesvos were forced to return to Turkey. With nowhere to put them the returning Greeks were herded onto the castle grounds, where they lived until they could find jobs, save some money, and build homes. Apparently, it wasn’t pretty. The influx of the Greek-Turkish now refugees set the stage for the influx to Lesvos of middle eastern and north African refugees today. That isn’t pretty either. Of the thousands attempting to get to Greece, many among those who survive the journey arrive in Lesvos. One tactic of the Greek coast guard is to intentionally push back refugee-laden boats to Turkish waters and then sink them, letting the Turks deal with the fallout. Failing that, the coast guard picks them up and brings them back to Mytilini, and once ashore, loads them onto buses and sends them to a camp. Refugee camps north of Mytilini still house several thousand, and refugees themselves are commonly seen around the city.

All of these contribute to the sense that there is a lot more going on in Mytilini than simply catering to tourists, which is of course what we experienced on most of the other islands we encountered on our meandering way through the Ionian and the Aegean this season. Mytilini is also a college town, with students attending from all over Greece. The city itself (about 30k people) is pretty, particularly the old town (the area that developed around the Ermou), as well as the rural exurbs with their olive groves and quiet dirt roads. As a major commodity market town, several streets around the harbor are lined with the mansions of former olive barons. Elegant stone structures with colored stucco and gothic or baroque or rococo exterior finishings (there was competition among them to outdo each other on the originality of their designs). Some are still family-owned and maintained, some are in severe disrepair, others have been sectioned into individual apartments, and many have been bought by the municipality and used as office buildings.

It is also gritty. There are plenty of tenement looking apartment buildings, and a huge, abandoned building dominates the harbor next to the ferry port. There is more trash evident than in the pristine tourist-heavy islands. People who live in Mytilini are working in Mytilini, mostly in the myriad local businesses that make the city so vibrant. We’ve seen one obviously “tourist” shop – on the Ermou, tucked between a cheese shop and a shoe shop. And I haven’t seen a single penis shaped trinket for sale anywhere. I told you it’s different.