A small island, a miniature of Greece. It doesn’t easily catch your eye, let alone confuse it with land due to its short distance from the Akarnan coast.
And yet it is there and has been traveling for centuries.
It travels in the endless blue of the Ionian Sea, without ever leaving the land.
So it has the advantage of winning from both. Learning from both.
Experiencing everything that land and sea give her in music, in language, in dance,
in the everyday life of her people who have always learned to live from both the land and the sea.
For this reason, but also for its indescribable beauty, it did not leave anyone unmoved for so many centuries.
Everyone wanted Lefkada. Everyone recognized its value and unique position and everyone turned to conquer it.
And her journey starts long long time ago, from the mythical Odysseus, when a German dreamy architect and amateur archaeologist,
William Derpfeld, set up a theory that Lefkada was his mythical island.
He studied, excavated its land and saw how its wonderful parts corresponded to those of the mythical kingdom
and made the decision that this is Lefkada, the Homeric Ithaca.
And they say that it got its name from Homer, from “Lefki Petri” its southernmost cape, which turns white as soon as the sunlight embraces it.
And later the Corinthians made it their colony and Philip with his soldier son Alexander
and Pyrrhus and the Romans and the Byzantines conquered it one by one for its valuable position.
Remnants of these times are the hill of Kulmos and its surrounding area with archaeological excavations again today, after the older ones of Derpfeld.
In fact, just recently (again) a theater came to light, they say the only one in the Ionian Islands.
And then around 1300 the West came and Lefkada changed masters again.
The Orsini were defeated, taken with a battle by the Andigai and then by the Tokus.
Everyone left something, so that they will be remembered in the ages.
Ioannis Orsini laid the first stones to build the castle that we see at the entrance of the island,
the one that was to become the capital of the island and to receive the name Agia Mavra from the succeeding Andigai people,
which would accompany it until the end of the 17th century.
And the Tokoi left the Kato alykes that they created around 1400 and made salt a treasure of the island.
And then the Turks passed, nearly 200 years and it is the only one of the Ionian Islands that experienced their sovereignty,
|and then the Venetians and the French, the Russo-Turkish and the English, until on May 21, 1864 it was united with Greece.
An eternal journey that still lasts and will last forever.
Because Lefkada, you can only dream of it.
Because in Lefkada, you can only set up your home.