About 3.4 miles off the western coast of Turkey, in the eastern Aegean Sea, there lies an island. For its forested mountains the Hittites called it Lazpa. The Greeks who came there over 3,000 years ago pronounced its name Lesbos. These days, Lesbos is also known as Mytilene, its capital city. In antiquity, Greeks and Romans knew Lesbos because of its poets, its people of letters, and its olive trees. Nowadays, people around the world recognize its name because of the thousands of refugees, who fleeing the wars of the Middle East and Afghanistan, crashed drenched, frightened, and uncertain on its shores. The image of a little boy swept dead on the Turkish shore across Lesbos still epitomizes the human drama of seeking a new home away from home.
It’s not, however, the mark Lesbos left on the early years of the 21st century the only reason I want to write about this island. It’s more than that. Coincidence or fate has made Lesbos relevant to our lives like few other places. Connecting the dots of the history of Lesbos, even though one dot was not consequential for the next, is a story worth telling.
The dots start with the birth of Sappho around 630 BCE. The ancients called her The Poetess for the beauty of her lyric poetry (the only female to be called that just like Homer was the only male poet to be called The Poet). Along with her compatriot Alcaeus, Sappho was recognized as one of the nine greatest poets of ancient Greece. Some called her the tenth Muse. Her lyricism inspired many, including Roman poets and, much later, European writers once she was discovered again in the 16th century. The passion of her poems, especially when she rhapsodizes of female characters, made her the first poet of female homoerotic love. That’s where Lesbian came from. Very little of her poetry survived the vicissitudes of human history. Here is the last stanza of her Ode to Aphrodite:
“Come to me once more, and abate my torment/ Take the bitter care from my mind, and give me/ All I long for/ Lady, in all my battles/ Fight as my comrade.”
Sappho was not the only great poet from Lesbos. In 1979, Odysseus Elytis, whose parents hailed from Lesbos, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Those who have sailed across the Aegean will recognize these islands in Elytis’ verses: “Ios, Sikinos, Serifos, Milos/ Each word and a swallow/ To bring you the spring amidst the summer”.
In the centuries between Sappho and Elytis, Lesbos became host to another great. Aristotle arrived in Lesbos in 344 BCE and stayed there for two years. There, the lagoon in the bay of Kalloni became Aristotle’s laboratory for the study of its aquatic and aviary life. One of the species was the cuttlefish. Aristotle dissected this and many other species, describing their anatomy and the functions of their organs. Beyond fish and birds, Aristotle studied mammals, including humans. His methodology for classifying animals into genuses and species was surpassed only by Karl Linnaeus’ taxonomy in the 18th century. In his book The Lagoon the biologist Armand Marie Leroi (of the Imperial College of London) offers a fascinating account of Aristotle’s observations, methods, and connections of his work to modern zoology and biology as well as the theory of evolution. As modern scientists do, Aristotle raised many research questions and, following a system of logic, gave answers that were insightful, albeit often erroneous or half-right. He wrote “nature makes [animal] instruments to fit the function, not the function to fit the instrument”. In other words, he understood that animals must be fit to survive their environment. He wrote that off-springs inherit their species and traits from their parents. Thus, he understood that procreation is the passing of genetic information from parent to off-spring. He did not go as far as to understand the role of adaptation in evolution, but he wrote that differences in species are gradual – or that nature evolves in small steps. Armand Leroi argues that Aristotle came tantalizingly close to grasping natural selection as the evolutionary mechanism in the development of life. It’s not too much to claim that Lesbos is the place where biology was born.
Lesbos would continue to be remembered only for Sappho, Aristotle, and its connection to Elytis if it were not for the Arab spring, the rise of fundamental Islam (ISIS) and the Afghan war. It was the confluence of these conflicts that broke all hell loose. In just 2015, over a million refugees crossed the Mediterranean toward Europe. Of these, 800,000 came to the Aegean islands across Turkey, with the majority landing on Lesbos. We all know the scenes of despair, bravery, and tragedy that unfolded as worn out men, women, and children tried to survive on rickety boats and make it to the shore. In an epic journey of hardship, sorrow and endurance these hundreds of thousands of refugees made their way to the Greek mainland and by various means to the lands north of Greece, seeking to ultimately reach Germany and other affluent European states.
While hundreds of volunteers from all over the world converged to Lesbos and other islands to help the refugees, the dark side of human nature reared its ugly head as hostile nationalist sentiments rose in European countries. One after the other, Slovenia, Hungary, and Austria closed their borders to the approaching refugees. In Greece, the far-right party Golden Dawn found a new foil for its supporters. Austria saw the rise of the nationalist Freedom Party while Hungary saw further consolidation of power in the hands of its undemocratic nationalist prime minister Viktor Orban of the Fidesz party. Even in Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party attracted enough voters to raise a strong anti-immigrant voice and challenge Chancellor Angela Merkel. The same in France and the U.K. In this country, a presidential candidate launched his campaign by promising to seal the US from those criminal hordes of immigrants passing through the southern border.
Human migration is not easy. Not for those who leave their homes or for those who see them before their homes. But how we think of and treat immigrants and refugees is a test of our society’s character. Humanitarian crisis is our failure to treat refugees humanely. It is not our failure to keep them away. Last October, Greek Coast Guard Lieutenant Kyriakos Papadopoulos was given a hero’s funeral for having saved 5,000 refugees from drowning in the Aegean. And a few weeks ago, Dionysis Arvanitakis, a baker in the island of Kos, was memorialized at his passing for feeding the refugees. These and countless others understood human dignity.
That’s the story of Lesbos. A legacy of poetic lyricism, scientific curiosity, and human strife for dignity.
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