Spinalonga
Σπιναλόγκα
Interesting facts
- The name is a Venetian mishearing: Greek speakers said stin Elounda, to Elounda, which Venetian ears turned into spina longa, long thorn.
- During the leper colony years the island was known locally as the island of the living dead.
- When patients were sent to Spinalonga, their names were struck from the civil registers of their home towns.
- In 1936 a young law student with leprosy, Epaminondas Remoundakis, founded a brotherhood that won the residents the right to marry and run businesses.
- The patients' brotherhood brought electricity, a café with a donated gramophone and a cinema to the island, and it also banned mirrors.
- In 1938 the residents were allowed to demolish a stretch of Venetian wall to build a perimeter path that disabled patients could use.
- The last resident, a priest, stayed until 1962 so he could hold the Orthodox memorial services due up to five years after each burial.
- Lila Kourkoulakou's documentary The Island of Silence, shot here, made her the first Greek woman director shown at an international film festival.
- Werner Herzog filmed part of his 1968 short film Last Words on the abandoned island.
- Spinalonga is the second most visited site in Crete after the Palace of Knossos.
Why it is worth it
A small, rocky island at the mouth of the Gulf of Elounda in eastern Crete is ringed almost entirely by Venetian walls and bastions, and its lanes still hold the houses and public buildings of a community that lived here in enforced isolation. Spinalonga covers only about 8.5 hectares, yet it carries four centuries of layered history: a sea fortress, an Ottoman village and, for half a century, one of the last leper colonies in Europe.
The Venetians, who ruled Crete, fortified the island from 1579 on plans drawn up by the engineer Genese Bressani to guard the harbour of Elounda. By 1584 it was armed with 35 cannon and counted among the strongest sea forts in the Mediterranean. It held out long after the rest of Crete fell to the Ottomans, and was handed over only in 1715. A Muslim village then grew up inside the walls and lasted through the nineteenth century, until its inhabitants left after the end of Ottoman rule on Crete.
In 1903 the island was designated as a place of compulsory isolation for people with leprosy, and the first 251 patients arrived in October 1904. Initially only Cretans were sent here; from 1913 patients came from all over Greece. The colony was closed in 1957, when the remaining residents were moved to a hospital in Attica. Spinalonga became widely known through Victoria Hislop's 2005 novel The Island, which is set among the colony's inhabitants. Across the water lies the fishing village of Plaka, within the municipality of Agios Nikolaos.
Getting there
The island lies in the Gulf of Elounda, a short boat crossing from Plaka and Elounda on the Cretan mainland. Heraklion is about 54 km away in a straight line, and Sitia Public Airport (JSH) is about 34 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Spinalonga is an island in the Gulf of Elounda, north-eastern Crete, in the municipality of Agios Nikolaos, Lasithi, next to the town of Plaka in the area of Kalydon. It is near the Spinalonga peninsula – which often causes confusion as the same name is used for both.
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