Lesvos: Island of Poets and Refuge

Sappho wrote her first poems here twenty-six centuries ago. In 1922, this island caught the world’s refugees. In 2015, it did it again.

Lesvos: Island of Poets and Refuge is the story of a single island that keeps finding itself, generation after generation, standing at the exact point where history crosses the water — from Bronze Age settlements that shared Troy’s own culture, through the golden age of Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pittacus, a rare century under Genoese rule, and nearly five hundred years under the Ottomans, into the two moments that define the island’s modern soul: absorbing hundreds of thousands of Greek refugees fleeing the Smyrna catastrophe in 1922–23, and doing it again, for an entirely different population, in 2015.

This is the direct companion volume to Smyrna: Roots of Fire — the shore the refugees actually reached, told from the other side of the water.

15 chapters, ancient history through today. History, culture, and home.