Lefkada
Lefkada, also known as Lefkas or Leukas and Leucadia, is a Greek island in the Ionian Sea on the west coast of Greece, connected to the mainland by a long causeway and floating bridge. The principal town of the island and seat of the municipality is Lefkada. It is situated in the northern part of the island, approximately 25 minutes by automobile away from Aktion National Airport. The island is part of the regional unit of Lefkada.
Geography
Lefkada measures from north to south, and from east to west. The area of the island is about, the area of the municipality is. Its highest point is the mountain Stavrota, at above sea level, situated in the middle of the island. The east coast section of the island has the small resorts of Lygia, Nikiana and Perigiali, all north of Nidri, the largest resort on the island. It is set in a sheltered location, with views across to Skorpios, Meganisi and other small islands, as well as the Greek mainland. The main coastal road from Lefkada to Vasiliki runs through the village, although a bypass has now been completed which skirts the village to the west. There are regular car ferries to Kefalonia, Ithaca and Meganissi.south of Nidri is the resort of Vasiliki, a windsurfing center. There are ferries to Kefalonia and Ithaca from Vasiliki. South of Vasiliki is Cape Lefkada, where Cephalus and the Greek female poet Sappho allegedly leapt to their death from the 30 m high cliffs on two separate occasions.
The famous beach of Porto Katsiki is located on Lefkada's west coast. Lefkada was attached to mainland Greece. The Corinthians dug a trench in the 7th century BC on its isthmus.
The southernmost tip of the island is called Cape Dukato, a name sometimes applied to the whole island.
Climate
The island has a typical Mediterranean climate with hot summers and cool winters, or Csa according to the Köppen climate classification system.History
Antiquity
The island is linked to Odysseus, the hero of Homer's Odyssey, who ruled it and neighbouring islands from Ithaca. The German archaeologist Wilhelm Dörpfeld, having performed excavations at various locations on Lefkada, was able to obtain funding to do work on the island by suggesting that Lefkada was Homer's Ithaca, and the palace of Odysseus was located west of Nydri on the south coast of Lefkada. There have been suggestions by local tourism officials that several passages in the Odyssey point to Lefkada as a possible model for Homeric Ithaca. The most notable of these passages, pushed by the local tourism board, describes Ithaca as an island reachable on foot, which was the case for Lefkada, since it is not really an island, being connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway. According to Strabo, the coast of Acarnania was called Leucas in earlier times.The ancient sources call Leucas a Corinthian colony, perhaps with a Corcyraen participation. There was a cult to Apollo Leucatos at the south western cape of the island, where white cliffs stand, that may have given its name to the island. This was a site where criminals were thrown in order to judge their guilt or innocence from their injury at the fall. Furthermore, according to legend, it was the jumping spot of Sappho when she committed suicide out of frustrated love and also that of Artemisia of Caria, and therefore may have some connection to Aphrodite.
During the Peloponnesian War, Leucas joined the Peloponnesian League. Later, the town was conquered during the 3rd century BC by Agathocles of Syracuse and was annexed to the Roman Republic in the next century, during their conquest of Greece. The famous naval battle of Actium was fought not far away, to the north east.
In antiquity, the island was connected to the mainland by a bridge, which was the longest stone bridge of ancient Greece.
In medieval British legend, Brutus of Troy found Lefkada abandoned after pirate attacks, and, after offering a sacrifice to a statue of Diana in the temple of a ruined city there, was granted a vision telling him to go to Britain and found an empire.
File:Expedición de Bruto a Aquitania.jpg|thumb|Brutus in the temple on Lefkada in a tapestry now in the Cathedral of the Savior of Zaragoza
Middle Ages
Byzantine period
No information survives on the island during the early Byzantine period, when the town possibly disappeared in the turmoils of the Migration Period. Nevertheless, unlike the Epirote mainland, where widespread Slavic settlement is attested from the late 6th until mid-8th centuries, only a handful of traces attest to a Slavic settlement in Lefkada.Information continues to be sparse during the Middle Byzantine period. The island is attested as a bishopric at the Fourth Council of Constantinople in 879, and was raised to archbishopric under Emperor Leo VI the Wise. Administratively, it was likely part of the Theme of Cephallenia. Liutprand of Cremona visited the island during his 968 embassy to Constantinople. In 1099, it was raided by Dagobert of Pisa, and it is mentioned in al-Idrisi's geography in the mid-12th century.
Epirote and Latin rule
The Republic of Venice was accorded privileges in the island in 1198 and possession of the island in the treaty of partition of the Byzantine Empire in 1204. Lefkada apparently became part of the Despotate of Epirus, although this is not explicitly attested until 1259.The name Santa Maura is first attested for the island and its capital in 1292, when Genoese ships in Byzantine employ raided it. In 1295, the Despot of Epirus Nikephoros I Komnenos Doukas ceded the island to his son-in-law, the Count Palatine of Cephalonia and Zakynthos John I Orsini. Orsini soon after received permission from Charles II of Naples to build a castle there, which became the core of the Castle of Santa Maura.
The Orsini family lost Lefkada in 1331 to Walter VI of Brienne, who in 1343 ceded the castrum Sancte Maure and the island to the Venetian Graziano Giorgio. In 1360/62, Leonardo I Tocco seized Lefkada, assuming the title of duke, whence the island is sometimes also referred to as "the Duchy" in Western sources of the period. The local Orthodox archbishop was evicted. After Albanian clans took over much of Epirus in the 1350s and 1360s, they launched frequent attacks on the island between 1375 and 1395. Carlo I Tocco made the island the capital of his domains, which apart from the County Palatine of Cephalonia and Zakynthos also included much of the Epirote mainland, and enlarged the fortified town.
In 1413, the Prince of Achaea, Centurione II Zaccaria, launched an attack on Lefkada and its castle with Albanian mercenaries, but were defeated with help from the Republic of Venice. The Ottomans captured most of Epirus and raided the island, leading the Tocci to consider ceding it to the Venetians.
Faced with expanding Ottoman power in the mainland, the Tocci became vassals of the Ottoman sultans. The last of them, Leonardo III Tocco was helped to maintain his rule through his marriage to Milica Branković, a niece of the highly esteemed stepmother of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed the Conqueror ; but when she died, he married the Aragonese Francesca Marzano. The couple quickly became hated by their Greek subjects due to their oppressive taxation. Lefkada, along with Cephalonia and Zakynthos, was captured by the Ottoman admiral Gedik Ahmed Pasha in 1479. Part of the population was deported to Constantinople as part of Mehmed's policy to repopulate his capital.
Ottoman period
The Ottomans called the island Levkada, with the name Aya Mavra reserved for the castle and capital of the island, where almost the entire population lived. Under Ottoman rule, it was initially a kaza of the sanjak of Karli-Eli, which from belonged to the Eyalet of the Archipelago, subordinated to the chief admiral of the Ottoman navy, the Kapudan Pasha. The kaza of Lefkada comprised not only the island, but also part of the adjoining mainland. The Venetians briefly occupied the island in 1502–03 during the Second Ottoman–Venetian War, but returned it to the Ottomans in the final peace settlement. With about a thousand inhabitants in, the town of Lefkada was both the largest settlement and the main military installation in the sanjak, with 111 soldiers and 9 artillerymen. As with the rest of the sanjak, at the time the entire population appears to have been Christian, and only the fortress garrisons and administrators were Muslim; thus the only mosques were located inside the fortresses.A lack of water led to the construction of a long aqueduct from the island's interior to the town in 1564, during the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Bringing water to the walled town, as well as to the much larger—some 700–800 houses—open town that had grown around it, was one of the most important works of Ottoman civil architecture in the western Balkans. On top of the aqueduct was a footpath that provided the only access to the island, other than by the sea. In the aftermath of the Ottoman defeat at the Battle of Lepanto, the castle was unsuccessfully besieged by the forces of the Holy League. As a result, it was completely rebuilt and enlarged by the Kapudan Pasha Kılıç Ali Pasha, in 1572–1574, into a hexagonal fortress with large towers as artillery platforms.
In the 17th century, Lefkada became a separate sanjak within the Eyalet of the Archipelago, although, according to Evliya Çelebi it belonged briefly to the Morea Eyalet in the 15th and 17th centuries. Evliya visited the island in 1670/71 and left a long and accurate description of the fortifications, as well as of the town, where Islam had apparently made considerable progress. According to Evliya, the walled town boasted five Friday mosques, including an Imperial Mosque, which was a converted church, a minor mosque, a madrasa, two schools, a bath, and five public fountains. The walled town, with its 200 stone houses, was now occupied exclusively by Muslims, while the two suburbs to the east and west were built of wood and had a mixed population. The western one was far larger, with 300 houses to 40–50 in the eastern one, and had a wooden mosque and masjid, a tekke, a maktab, two caravanserais, as well as seven small churches. Evliya remarks that this suburb had many wine shops, which were popular with both the inhabitants and the garrison. Another suburb was located on the island itself, with some 700 houses, all of them inhabited by Christian Greeks, who had 20 churches. Evliya's account is corroborated by Jacob Spon and George Wheler's account that the town had about 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants, mostly Greeks or Turks.
According to the descriptions of travellers like Evliya, Lefkada was an urban centre of some importance, boasting "two of the largest works of Ottoman civil and military architecture in the Western Balkans", namely the aqueduct built by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and the Castle of Santa Maura, which was completely rebuilt by Kılıç Ali Pasha in the reign of Sultan Selim II.