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The top level of the island is dominated by the Venetian gun battery which has commanding views out to the open sea. In it's day the battery would have contained a variety of different sizes of cannon.
It would have been a brave pirate or attacker who tried to get past these guns to reach the nearby town of Agios Nicholaos |
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| The walls of the battlements are several meters thick in places and in addition to the large cannon holes there are also slits in the top of the wall and a platform for musketeers to use to fire at any enemy. |
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Inside the fortress the Venetians would have led quite comfortable lives. This house which has been restored is typical of the type of houses that they would have lived in. |
| In spite of all this wonderful history Spinalonga is not most famous for it's fortress and it has a much more gory claim to fame.. Until the 1950s it was a Leper colony. This was a place where people with the disease Leprosy were forced to live out their lives away from all human contact until the day they died. Once a person was sent through this tunnel there was no return, and for this reason it was known as the gateway to Hell. |
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Another building at the top of the Island is the Leper hospital where the severely ill inmates of the island were treated. This treatment usually consisted of amputating the badly affected areas of the body and trying to ease the agonies of Leprosy. The hospital is built as high as possible so the wind could pass through it and help keep the awful smell away.
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The ruins of the old Venetian buildings are in front of the Hospital. The lepers lived in these ruins supported entirely by welfare payments from the government, which in fact made them quite well off.
| Because it is only 50 years since the colony closed when a cure was found it is still very easy to get the feeling of what life there must have been like. Even the wash boards where the Lepers scrubbed their bandages to keep them clean and help prevent infection are still in place. |
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