home Articles Agios Efstratios: the unknown island of the Aegean Sea
Agios Efstratios: the unknown island of the Aegean Sea

It is rare, if not unlikely, for a saint to become synonymous with a cumulative tragic memory… A saint’s life may be intertwined with persecution, suffering and martyrdom, but not social or political. But moral and theological – at the level of individual consciousness – persecutions and martyrdoms…
Yet this saint, a saint of the 9th century after Christ, established by the Orthodox hagiography, became universal in the absolute sense: political, martyrdom and outcry.
On the other hand, few until now, have seen the place that encloses this martyr island as a material relic, fleshed out and poisoned by rocks, trees, people and sandy beaches.
Agios Stratis is an island full of history and palpable memories, routes and hidden magical corners.

Text: Κυριάκος Παπαγεωργίου
Photos: Άννα Καλαϊτζή
Agios Efstratios: the unknown island of the Aegean Sea
Categories: Tours
Destinations: AEGEAN SEA

It is rare, if not unlikely, for a saint to become synonymous with a cumulative tragic memory… A saint’s life may be intertwined with persecution, suffering and martyrdom, but not social or political. But moral and theological – at the level of individual consciousness – persecutions and martyrdoms…

Yet this saint, a saint of the 9thth century after Christ, established by the Orthodox hagiography, became a universal, in the absolute sense: political, martyrdom and outcry.

On the other hand, very few, until now, have seen the place that encloses this martyred island as a material relic, fleshed out and poisoned by rocks, trees, people and sandy beaches.

Agios Stratis is an island full of history, history and palpable memories, routes and hidden magical corners.

Indeed, the island has a huge historical memory, which begins to dawn in Homer’s time and fades away, reaching the era of unquenchable political hatred.

From the time when Philoctetes became a victim of a snake and got his leg crushed, so that the island became famous in Homeric times (Philoctetes, Sophocles), until our dramatic days when Enceladus on one side (1968) and Metaxas on the other, made sure that its reputation as a place of exile was perpetuated, St Stratis struggled to take off the mantle of the “alienated” and put on the pure “soul” of the pure and beautiful Aegean island.

On no other Greek island do memories dance so paradoxically and contradictorily. The ? F i l l o k t i t i e s   who was forced to stay on the island after the hanging of the snake (most long-standing historians agree), the sinking and the sinking of the island (the former Ch r y s i a   and the emergence of the “Winds” (in the form of ships) and even the ancient appearance of the name “Alonnisos” and the flattening piracy, until the island’s namesake, Agios Efstratios, was exiled around 850 AD.These events mark a course, more or less expected and historical in the narrow sense of the word.

From then on, Agios Stratis is abandoned, deserted, only to be repopulated by Asia Minor Aeolians who bring with them the “Ionian” architectural style, building their houses with cachinnabar, strange oriental balconies and furrows, which will eventually become the prey of the terrible earthquake in February 1968.

The isolation of the island (from the Greek State) is compounded by an “Idionymos” law of 1929 (by Venizelos, please) that settles a few, it is true, exiles and displaced persons, here in the wilderness, as the island is thin and uninhabited. Metaxas also finds the opportunity open and enriches the island with hundreds of unwanted citizens, whose only crime was the colour of their ideas…

To get to the years of political and social hatred, from 1947 to 1963, when successive “democratic” governments settled thousands of intellectuals and politicians here, with strict orders to the Gendarmerie to keep them away from the poor Ayostratites.

But how can Yannis Ritsos, Manos Katrakis, Menelaos Loudemis, Titus Patrikios, Nikos Karouzos or the heroic Costas Gavrielidis who died here, so that his death could become the poetry of the greats of the displaced Idea?

Constantine Karamanlis had to “envision” the entry of our country into the EEC, to receive the message that he had to close this shameful shame of a democratic country…

In 2002, when there were weekday routes from Volos to Agios Stratis, I did not miss the opportunity and I passed the “alcove” of “Alkaios”, with my motorcycle!..

I didn’t take my “motorbike” to travel around the island, since none of the visitors knew until then whether there were roads on Agios Stratis anyway, but to carry my few possessions safely, without the feeling of scattering and possible loss. So I tied the hiking and snorkeling gear to the engine rack and bolted to the stern pedestal of the Alcaeus, tying it up by the iron rings.

Then I went out into the air, the barest gust of wind pushing me into an impatience and a tightness in my heart, different from the many that have come to me during my years of island adventure.

I had also booked a small room on the island, so from two o’clock when I entered, I got off the island at about ten o’clock in the evening.

First, however, I witnessed one of the most beautiful sunsets my eyes have ever seen in my long walk through the Aegean archipelago: A dusk that coloured our sporadic islands with interspersed shades of melange. In particular, the rugged and panoply of Piperio and the towering bulk of Jura will remain unforgettable and deeply engraved in my memory. However…

One was the planning of the trip and another adventure came up… Aesthetic and naturalistic.

The visit and my trip were meant, he says, to trace the place of martyrdom, to draw out emotions and fish out those who were still alive, from the 1950s, to learn first-hand the what and how, in St. Stratis…

The first – and last – image of St. Stratis is printed countless times on the maps and tributes of our islands. Three sculpted houses with a carved roof, which are the permanent facade of the island in the circulated photographic images. Nothing else. Oh, there is a school left, (Maraslio, please) but also a tin structure on the hilltop from the concentration camp. The rest of the buildings are pre-cat in crudely built, shabby and unsightly, dwellings. Two or three pine trees give a false sense of a square and beyond that for many there is no island…

At the end of the right side of the inhabited village there is a wonderful beach, the “Sahadirada”, an oasis of beauty and challenge, where the locals head for swimming. But!

But St. Stratis, beyond the camp and the new concrete houses, has depth and substance… A great “depth” and an exuberant “substance”…

Starting at the end of the road after the camp and going up the rough hill.

I tried to sneak my machine into this immaculate paradise of St. Stratis.

A dirt road sloped gently uphill to a looming ridge. Then it left behind it all its sluggish and uncompromising terrain, entering, with a rushing mood, an unexpected, prolonged and hopeless spectacle of a unique forest of low (herbaceous) oak, considered endemic and particularly important for its flora and species throughout Europe.

From the edge of the forest, a path crosses it and descends to Alonitsi beach. The route is one of the most beautiful of the island, as it passes through the low oak forest and ends up on the most impressive coastline of Ai-Strati, with a front to the entire volume of Lemnos that jumps out of the northern windows of the Aegean.

At the same time a second dirt road, grassy, with a double pomegranate engraved on its course, ran off to the east, heading up the main mountain ridge of the island.

After travelling a distance of two kilometres on my motorcycle, I left the main dirt road and headed north towards the vast and expansive coastline at A l l o n i t s i t . Passing through oak forests and gullies with special vegetation and dew, I ended up at Alonitsi beach, which faces north and has Lemnos opposite.

What makes it particularly attractive is the fine-grained sand, but especially the volcanic rock that rises to the west and is an amalgam of volcanic and cave holes. A curious, beautiful and special kind of volcanic rock, which, after all, is scattered all over the island.

The most curious thing is that Agios Stratis has a primitive, but dense and intricate network of road cuts that make all the beaches of the island accessible. But you will say to me, does St Stratis have beaches? The beaches and sandy beaches of the island are among the most beautiful in Greece!

In the eight days I stayed in Agios Stratis and from one beach, in an adventurous way, I discovered each time…

Count versions: Ayantonis, St. Demetrius, Trigari, Loudario, Felios, Gournia and Frangos, all in order and from the western side of the island. All these beaches are reached by vague paths, more or less indifferent, which descend the bare body of the island from its western side and reach them after hour-long or shorter routes. If we add Alonitsi (a corruption of Alonissos) which is the only northern beach on the island, as well as “Saharada”, next to Chora, then we will conclude that Agios Stratis has nine fantastic and pristine sandy beaches, which can be the envy of any island in the archipelago…

I remember with pain, the many references and tributes to Agios Stratis, from numerous newspapers and magazines, which came to my knowledge, for which there is nothing on the wretched Agios Stratis except the historical memory, the earthquake and the two or three little houses of the harbour… Not a single map dealt with the special face and the grassy paradise of the island. What about the beaches? Not a single person set foot on them during the days I stayed on the island. Only a few locals – and they were foreigners – who owned a boat sailed to them, as a family.

My last day on St. Stratis was very suspenseful. I wanted to do the entire route of the island’s mountain ridge, all the way to Cape T r u p h i n g .

I rode my bike and zeroed the odometer. When I reached the end of the island, which rose with considerable crags of squamous sandstone above the sea, I descended first to the small beach of Tripiti and after a dip in the murky Aegean waters, turning on the central axis, I walked to where a huge metallic, round and shiny object gleamed at the tip of the peninsula.

The thorns, thistles and saprophytes had blocked the approach of the metal mirror, which from a certain position reflected in the sky a wreath of fire, emitting an everlasting source of light from the earth.

I was coming to the famous and tragic monument of S i a l m a, this new martyr of our fighter aviation who “fell” when he was forced to make this interception, which we hear every day, for months and years, from the media, of the Turkish warplanes, as the latter consider the Aegean and our islands as a place of bravado and practice of their military friction.

Syalmas, ordered to “stand up alone” and intercept a squadron of Turkish jets, drove a wedge into the Turkish fighters, who marked him and shot down his ship. The fateful crash of the Sialma  brought the fateful crash at the farthest point of the St. Stratis Trypiti…

At the same spot his friends and allied pilots of the Greek aviation, at their own expense and with all the sheet metal of the aircraft that crashed in Tripiti, built a round metal monument, which looks like a shield and reflects in the sky and on its roof they glued in capital letters – again with sheet metal of the same aircraft – the simple words of Leonidas MOLON LAVE!

The monument of Sialma (13.5 km from Chora of Agios Stratis) is perhaps the most inaccessible and inaccessible war cenotaph in Chora.

Only tears can only be caused by those idyllic moments, as you suddenly and unexpectedly face, almost in the nowhere of Greece, this silent and tragic face of the undeclared war with the neighbour…

The “fall” of the sun, blue and all-red, was also my emotion, just as the “fall” of Siallma from the blue ether was red with the blood of the innocent Greek pilot…

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