Cross to the island town where people with leprosy married anyway

Spinalonga is a small island in the mouth of the bay at Elounda, almost entirely wrapped in a Venetian fortress. Inside the walls is a town: stone houses, a church, hospital buildings on one of the bastions, and the cafés the residents once ran themselves. From 1904 to 1957 this was where Crete, and later the whole of Greece, sent people with leprosy, and the people sent here made it a place to live.

The island sits so close to Plaka that it fills the view from the village, and the boat across takes about five minutes. The group crosses at opening, with a guide, before the island fills up.

The way in is through the gate, and then the town itself, house by house, up to the church and along the road that runs all the way round the island. That road is part of the story. It is the second most visited site on Crete, so the first quiet hour is the one to have.

The Cretan State made the island a leprosarium in 1903, and the first 251 patients arrived in October 1904. Whoever was sent lost their political rights and their property, and an existing marriage was annulled. Goods were bought at a small market outside the main gate, paid for, through the guard, with money that had been sterilized first. Marriage among the patients was prohibited, and many married anyway and had healthy children. In March 1936 Epaminondas Remoundakis, a law student in his third year, came of his own accord to join his sister, and became a leading figure in the Brotherhood of the Sick of Spinalonga, the first association of its kind in Greece. In 1938 and 1939 the Brotherhood had sections of the old walls brought down with dynamite to open a road around the island, and an inscription on the eastern terrace records it. In 1957 the patients were moved to the hospital of Agia Varvara in Attica.