Third-largest Greek island — Sappho's birthplace, ouzo capital, and petrified forests 20 million years old
Lesbos (also Lesvos) is a large, diverse Aegean island — big enough to drive for an hour through olive groves (home to 11 million trees, producing some of Greece's finest oil), across salt flats where flamingos feed, and into pine-forested mountains. Mytilene, its capital, has the handsome waterfront mansions of 19th-century Ottoman-era merchants; the western village of Molyvos (Mithymna) has a Genoese castle above one of the most photogenic harbours in the Aegean; and the petrified forest in the southwest is a UNESCO Global Geopark where 20-million-year-old fossilised trees stand upright in…
Lesbos was one of the great cultural centres of ancient Greece — the poets Sappho (c. 630 BCE) and Alcaeus were born here, as was the philosopher Theophrastus and the lyric musician Terpander. Sappho's poetry, written in the Aeolic Greek dialect native to Lesbos, was considered in antiquity second only to Homer in greatness; only fragments survive. The island's name gives English the words 'lesbian' and 'sapphic.' In the medieval period Lesbos was a Genoese possession for nearly a century under the Gattilusio dynasty (1355–1462), whose castle at Molyvos survives intact.