CAST AWAY

Despite being known as the Isle of Outcasts, there is nothing tragic about Leros – home to picturesque windmills, pretty beach tavernas and a very warm welcome, says Sarah Holt.

- Sarah Holt

The sea slaps at the sides of the multi-coloured fishing boats as fishermen mend their nets on the dock and a young boy pulls platinum-scaled fish out of the water on a handline. Watching the scene from a sun trap table at a waterside cafe in Agia Marina, the main town of Leros, I can’t understand how this Greek island could ever have been known as the “Isle of Outcasts” or the “Island of the Damned”.

A quick skim of the history books reveals that Leros was the second most bombed Greek island of the Second World War, a place of internment for political prisoners of the Greek junta dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, and the location of a psychiatric hospital that was closed down for the abysmal treatment of its patients in the 1990s.

Yet, aside from an immaculately kept war cemetery, a small military museum, the remains of a couple of crumbling gun batteries and an acoustic military mirror on the west coast, there are no signs of the island’s tumultuous past here today. Just a 90-minute ferry ride from busier, better-known Kos, Leros is one of the most laid-back Greek islands I’ve experienced.

Hunkered around a ferry port barely larger than the average back garden, Agia Marina is a huddle of independent linen, ceramic and jewellery boutiques, private studio apartments and traditional tavernas, and gyros eateries. There’s a twin set of bakeries, too, where the specialities are Lerian cheese pies, made with feta, pastry and a dusting of cinnamon.