"Certain Places Have Different Energy": Spatial Transformations in Eresos, Lesvos

The village of Eresos is located in the western part of the island of Lesvos, about ninety kilometers from Mytilini, the capital, and has a permanent population of over twelve hundred. ¹ It is considered the birthplace of Sappho and of Theofrastos, a student of Aristotle. Eresos was built between the eleventh and ninth centuries B.C. by Aeolians, at a spot now known as Vigla, on a hill on the southern side of Skala Eresos. In the seventeenth century A.D. the town was moved to a more mountainous area, about six kilometers from the sea. It was liberated from Ottoman domination in 1912. Eresos has a rich tradition in the arts and letters. Since the 1950s, however, its population has gradually decreased through emigration. The village's present economy is based on agriculture and tourism. Having a sandy beach some 2.5 kilometers long and deep-blue seas that have been awarded the European Economic Community "Blue Flag," and offering tourist services at the highest level, Eresos is one of Lesvos's main tourist spots. ²

Eresos is also a place with female energy, a place where lesbian women gather to pay tribute to Sappho. ³ Since the end of the 1970s a fairly large number of lesbian women--coming initially from the United States and northern Europe and later from Italy, Spain, and other places, as well as from elsewhere in Greece --have visited Eresos, which has become known as a point for lesbian women from all over the world to meet during the summer. A seasonal lesbian community is re-created every summer, a community with its own territorial and symbolic boundaries, a community differentiated over time.

The first paragraph above constitutes a brief description of the place as it is presented in tourist guides and brochures published by the municipality of Eresos, while the second focuses on the characteristics of Eresos that have attracted lesbian women from all over the world in recent years. My choice of contrasting descriptions is not accidental. Since Eresos first gained a reputation as a place that attracts lesbians, overt antagonism has arisen between lesbian women and the local people, often in the form of a contest--on both territorial and symbolic levels--for the facts. Lesbian women who visit Eresos lay claim to it because it gave birth to and brought up Sappho; in this respect it is a place of symbolic meaning for the lesbian community. Locals who wish to claim it as their own stress their right to invest in the kind of tourists they want. During the years between the establishment of a lesbian community in Eresos in the late 1970s and the discord of today that pits an "us" against a "them," stories of "wild women" versus "moral locals," on the one hand, and of "vulgar locals" versus "liberal and independent women," on the other, have proliferated. Attempts to describe the lesbian community of Eresos have converged to confirm the confrontation.

But to insist on the opposition implies a failure to interpret the changes that have led to a blurring of the borders between the communities of lesbian women and villagers and also a failure to account for the economic, political, and cultural parameters that have informed these changes. To the extent that "sexual politics must not be treated in isolation and wider political economic forces and considerations are at play in the production of sexualized spaces," one should not neglect that a lesbian community in Eresos has been created not in a remote spot but in a highly touristed one. ⁴ Lesbian women who visit Eresos can simultaneously be lesbians, "pilgrims," visitors, tourists, and entrepreneurs, while the local people of Eresos are both the guardians of its traditions and morals, on the one hand, and businesspersons and people who profit from tourism, on the other. My goals...