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| Spinalonga - outside 'Dante's Gate' |
This is a place with a story.
Greece has some 6,000 islands scattered in the Aegean and Ionian seas and Spinalonga is one of them, recently made famous by the novel based on its history as a Leper Colony by Victoria Hislop - and soon to be made into a Holywood film!
This is a small island yet it has in its past sustained an Ottoman fortress and at the beginning of the 20th Century a significant independent municipal population.
Yet it is probably most famous for the years 1903 through to 1957 when it served as an isolated 'sanctuary' for those afflicted with leprosy.
Boat trips from Agios Nikolas where we were staying were not yet running to Spinalonga so we took a bus ride through the hills to Elounda, the next port along the coast and immediately opposite the island, and caught one of the first boats of the season to make the journey.
Today Spinalonga is something of a Ghost Town, a rather spooky place with an atmosphere which is slightly disturbing.
Upon landing and paying your entrance fee you walk through a dark archway called 'Dante's Gate' knowing that many hundreds of people walked nervously this way in times gone by as they started a new life in a strange place literally 'cut off' from all they had known before.
In Victoria Hislop's novel Eleni first makes that journey, lasting only a few years on the island. It's a harrowing read as she discovers she has leprosy and leaves her family in the town of Plaka opposite the island. Imagine being able to see your house yet be so separated from your family. In the end her daughter Maria is also 'exiled' to the island - yet she has the joy of living at a time of new medical treatment and eventually leaves Spinalonga to start a new life once again on the mainland.
This small island has so many stories to tell: the tragedy of hundreds of people living with a disease that at one time meant certain death, the campaigning of 'significant' lepers who ensured that residents received social security, could live independently for as long as possible and have fresh food delivered, the dignity of that community which over the years developed shops, businesses, churches and even a cinema, and the 'happy ending' when multi-drug therapy eventually meant that every resident could return home and the last person to leave the island was a Greek Orthodox Priest in 1962.
Of course I couldn't help remembering those wonderful gospel stories of Jesus encountering lepers in his country and astonishing people by the way he treated them with so much respect and warmth. In these accounts we encounter the Compassionate Jesus.
I think one of Spinalonga's main stories is the way that people who thought they were going to a life of cruel exclusion actually found a place of supportive community.
Of course it wasn't easy, it wasn't always optimistic, it had so much tragedy at its heart....yet...yet... something of the Easter message could even be found on Spinalonga, found through the triumph of the human spirit which made community out of exclusion.
Yet another example, I believe, of the divine all mixed up and made manifest in the human.
Best wishes,
Ian
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