The unknown “Spinaloga” of Piraeus and its tragic human stories

“Spinaloga” of Piraeus is characterized by islet of Agios Georgiosat the entrance to the port of Salamis, chosen in the 19th century to fulfill the purpose of a sanatorium, due to its proximity to the large urban centers of Athens and Piraeus, not only during the occasional pandemic outbreaks, but also after the Asia Minor disaster , when it welcomed thousands of refugees.

Photographs from the album of the collection of Anastasios Kanellopoulos, depicting freed prisoners who arrived in the first months of 1923 on the island of Agios Georgios, were presented today by the assistant professor of the Department of History and Archeology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Stratos Dordanas, in the context of the International Scientific Conference, with the theme “The day after the Disaster”, which started in Kalamaria.

“Several of them are ragged and injured, all visibly exhausted and with heads shaved for hygiene reasons, initially receiving rudimentary care with food and blankets in the countryside,” he said.

Describing her history of the islandMr. Dordanas noted that after the First World War it returned to its main purpose, that of sanitariumwhile people and goods had to pass through it quarantine which the Greek state had imposed on its changing borders at the time.

For people, the stay could last a month or so, and for goods even longer.

After the Little Russian disaster, it was overwhelmed by thousands of refugeeswhile testimonies of those who passed through there state:

“on a small pier, where the boatmen lead us, stands a gentleman in a white cap, servile to the rich and even rude to the poor. A clerk, a bureaucrat. Barbed wire fences separate the stalls. The quarantine. Stinky quarantine on a desert island the size of a large square. Quarantine idiots against all laws of logic. Cholera outbreak. Here employees, there looters and dishonest. Shame on the Greek government that established this institution.

They kept us there four days, making us wallow with strangers, among the bugs and centipedesunder a fiery sky, without a tree on that devil’s island.

A restaurant with a pompous title, a place of debauchery, where those who patronize it, a member of parliament as it appears, allow water to be sold at 40 cents a liter and force you to eat filth at outrageous prices.”

There is little information available on the course of the island between 1923 – 1944, during which time its use as a sea mark by the Germans during the occupation certainly constitutes an interruption to its use for military purposes.

With the liberation, the sanitarium also returned, when the 1947 a few hundred travelers from Egypt passed there for purification due to an outbreak cholera. She was also last time.

According to the assistant professor of the Department of History and Archeology of the AUTH, “until August 1967 the islet functioned periodically as a colony of frenoblamas to be cut off from its political life since then, passing into the hands of the Navy for the sake of the Naval Station of Salamis ».

Mr. Dordanas commented, closing his introduction, that “today, the island of Agios Georgios is eagerly awaiting its own Victoria Hislop, in the person of Leda Papastephanaki.

The scientific program under her supervision is expected and estimated to give historical status and voice to the abandoned and forgotten sanatoriums of the Greek area”, he added.

RES-EMP

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