Mussolini’s forgotten fascist outpost
Though built on Il Duce’s orders, Lakki on Leros has real charm, says Heidi Fuller-Love
The immense sun-baked boulevard lined with majestic officers’ homes – called “palacini” or “small palaces” – stretched ahead of me into the heat-shimmered distance. To my left, a group of children touting brightly coloured satchels looked minuscule beneath the elephant-sized portals of their primary school.
“Like all fascist architecture, it was built on a massive scale,” local historian Giorgos Trampoulis told me, as he led me out to see the sights of Lakki, Mussolini’s Aegean HQ on the Dodecanese island of Leros in the southern Aegean Sea.
Wandering from central Roussos Square down to its sister plateia, Agios Nikolaos, near the harbour, we strolled through wide tree-shaded promenades that would not have looked out of place in Lombardy. Built in the 1930s to imitate the architecture of ancient Rome, the wide streets and monumental facades seemed odd compared with the low buildings and winding one-carwide streets elsewhere on the island. Behind the high facades, many buildings stood empty, though, or were buried beneath piles of gull-picked litter.
Passing the stark white bell tower of St Nicholas church and the town’s striking clock tower rising tall and square above the perfect circular atrium of the – now tatty and abandoned – market place, we paused to admire the bulletshaped facade of the town’s art deco cinema. I told Giorgos it was like walking through an abandoned film set. “It’s a bit like that – and Mussolini was the filmmaker,” he laughed.
Seated at a café squeezed between tall Tuscan columns, we sipped glasses of the local almond beverage, soumada. “All this was marshland until 1923,” Giorgos said, wiping the frothy milk from his lips. “That’s when Mussolini tasked two of his favourite architects – Armando Bernabiti and Rodolfo Petracco – with building a model town for his army. It was to be built in rationalist style – simple and functional like ancient temples – but Il Duce was more than a thousand miles away in Rome, so the architects did their own thing and added lots of art deco flourishes.”
The result was Lakki – better known as Portolago by the Italians – one of the best examples of rationalist-fascist architecture outside of Italy.
Hopping into Giorgos’s battered Lada (“My other one’s a Porsche,” he joked) we headed for Mount Patella, a shrubcovered hill behind Lakki that was an Italian military base during the Second World War. Gunning the engine, Giorgos turned onto a goat track climbing steeply along the edge of a cliff. He took one hand from the wheel to point out the vast natural harbour – one of southern Europe’s biggest – far beneath.
About 200 nautical miles from Piraeus – and barely 10 from the Turkish coast – this sheltered port was already of strategic importance in the 5th century BC during the Peloponnesian War. It was also the reason why this island was passed back and forth between conquering hordes for centuries.
“The harbour is very deep so it’s good for submarines. That’s why Mussolini
‘The architects did their own thing and added lots of art deco flourishes’
made Leros a base for his navy: it was the perfect HQ for controlling the eastern Mediterranean,” said Giorgos.
Parking the car, we hiked over a stone-littered hillside to three convex concrete walls set in a circle. Giorgos stood me close to the curved concrete. “This is a parabolic acoustic wall. It’s one of only two that survived the war. The other is in Sicily,” he said.
A precursor of radar, the wall was operated by a special military corps made up of blind soldiers who were thought to have more sensitive hearing. Standing several yards away, Giorgos whispered: “Mussolini’s ears!”
I could hear him as clearly as if he were standing next to me.
Odd facts abound in Leros. From 1958 to 1995, for example, this Dodecanese atoll was home to one of Europe’s largest psychiatric hospitals. Housed in Mussolini’s former barracks, the asylum – dubbed “Europe’s guilty secret” – also served as a prison for more than 4,000 political prisoners during the Greek Junta years from 1967 to 1974.
Leros was also the setting of the ferocious Second World War battle that inspired Alistair MacLean to write his wartime classic The Guns of Navarone.
The history of the 52-day Battle of Leros in 1943, which was to be the Nazis’ last significant victory in the Mediterranean, is related at the island’s War Tunnels museum in Merikia. Reached via a potholed seaside road winding past deserted beaches and bombed-out buildings, the museum is a wonderful hotchpotch of old film footage, photographs and wartime memorabilia.
Emerging from the tunnels into birdwarbling dusk, I drove along winding roads to the seaside resort of Agia Marina where I was on a film set once more, only this time it was one of those black-and-white 60s movies that are always being shown on Greek TV.
Strolling along Agia Marina’s narrow promenade, dodging fishermen darning their mustard-yellow nets and black-clad ya yas chivvying gaggles of grandchildren, I made my way to Mylos, a fish taverna in a converted windmill overlooking the choppy blue waters of Agia Marina’s pebble-lined bay. It was 7pm – early by local standards – but it was already packed.
“Most of our clients are Greek. We don’t get so many foreign visitors on Leros. We’re not really on the tourist radar,” owner Mario Koutsounaris said as he served up seafood meze: wild sea oysters in their gnarly shells; sea urchins drizzled in a spicy sauce; slivers of sea bass sashimi and grilled octopus with a crunchy samphire salad.
A group of Turkish tourists tucked into a seafood platter at the table next to me. “We’re so close to Turkey, they come over in their yachts,” Mario confided. “They behave like Greeks did in the days of Onassis: they order the most expensive dishes on the menu.”
He laughed. “Turkish? Italian? Who cares? We Mediterraneans appreciate the good things in life. Not even wars can prevent that.”