Mytilene: The abandoned French – allied cemetery in the Baths of Lesvos

It was created for the victims of the very dead battle of Gallipoli, 109 years ago… Unknown how many there are and where they “hold their knuckles”. In historical memory the site in which they were provided remains, as a “French” or “Allied” cemetery. It is the cemetery of the young children of Europe and not only, who came to this island, across the Asia Minor coast and who knows where else… And they stayed here forever. Forgotten and forgotten by their own homelands that these days honour again, this time in 109 years, since the great battle of Gallipoli. In a small village on the road from Loutra to Skala Loutron a few kilometers outside the city of Mytilene. Under a low hill, the so-called Castri, with a large cross that looks like a finger from the sky, the point. The Ladder Baths at the eastern entrance of Gera Bay according to historians played an important role in modern history. In the 1st World War, just before Greece entered the conflict with the prefect of the extreme Venizelos George Papandreou, this safe cove was used as an anchorage for the French Fleet and at the same time as a supply station for French and colonial troops fighting in Gallipoli. “Lesbos,” says APE-ABE the historian Stratis Reader, “had been occupied by English and French troops in the summer of 1915 and was used along with Limnos, Imbros and Tenedos as a place of anchor of allied ships during the operations of Gallipoli, but also as a place of hospital care to the wounded of operations. The French troops’ barracks were the wider area of the Baths”. The remains of this period are the ruined cemetery, on the rural road from Baths to Skala. The wrecked posts on the right and left of the built entrance show that once the site was at least as edited as possible. Fat duvets now demolished in many places surround him. And on the embankment to its upper side, one can see that it has been left over from a monument that once existed there. A monument that is photographed. His photograph belonging to Mr. Stratis Reader, was taken by an unknown in May 1940 and depicts the anthematic column in the cemetery of Loutras. At its top among branches we read: Armée d’ Orient, i.e. Army of the East. In the middle of the column: A nos camarades, morts à Mitylene pendant l’ occupation franchise, i.e. To our comrades, who died in Mytilene during the French Occupation 1916-1919. At the bottom of the column right the name of the sculptor P. BU[?]EON is difficult to see and underneath an illegible inscription. “Already since 1940, when the photo was taken, the column had been damaged,” Mr. Reader tells us. When was it completely destroyed? Unknown… some say it was destroyed during the Nazi occupation. “In the past”, recalls the president of the Basil Mamolis Baths Community “there was an effort to buy and decent. Then there was money, the owner of the site agreed to sell it but eventually unknown for what reason nothing happened…”. “In 1987”, says historian researcher Makis Axiotis, “the late president of Loutra Samartzis raised me in the middle of the long peak of the hill above the French Cemetery, to show me the “castri”. A rough, fortified structure of limestone, an enclosure 15 meters long, 4.5 metres wide (both the top) and two meters high. Towards the bay, with the vast view, it had 16 parallel-lined battles, 0.30 by 0.35 m. This definitely belonged to a fortification project, perhaps a multi-voltage, of the World War I era and supervised the Allied facilities in Skala. It is one of the few monuments of this period preserved on the island On the anniversary of the end of World War I, in October 2018, an event took place in the French cemetery in memory of the victims of the battle of Gallipoli. The site was cleaned, a new inscription was placed, a ceremony was held at which new promises were made and the very next day everything was forgotten. Could the whole place turn into a place of honor? Could the competent agency of Allied Cemeteries in Greece deal with this forgotten space? The cemetery along with the “Castri” can constitute a reference site to historical memory in this place. Or what’s left? Pericles’s saying: “All earth’s prominent grave”. Where prominent men these forgotten lads…