Qualla: Cunda Island

Cunda Island: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Magurale, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the Ottoman census of the early 1880s, the island then known as Moschonisi counted 4,671 people, and 4,417 of them were Greek. Nine in ten. Today not one of those families remains, and the great Greek Orthodox cathedral they built has become a museum. Cunda Island, also called Alibey, sits in the Edremit Gulf just sixteen kilometers off the coast of Lesbos. It is now a sunlit Aegean resort of cobbled lanes and whitewashed windmills, and to walk it well you have to know whose hands laid the stones.

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Image: Magurale | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cunda Island: The Fragrant Island

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aslı Diken, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Greeks called it Moschonisi, the fragrant island, the largest of an archipelago they named Hekatonisa after the goddess Hekate. Settlement here reaches back into antiquity, to places the old sources call Nasos, Pordoselene, and Chalkis. Pausanias, the ancient travel writer, r...

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Image: Aslı Diken | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cunda Island: A Community Destroyed

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Map created from DEMIS Mapserver, which are public domain., CC BY-SA 3.0. What happened to that world was deliberate and devastating, and it must be told plainly. In 1913, an Ottoman official proposed settling wealthy Muslim migrants on the island to dilute its Greek majority. Persecution began in 1914. The bishop Photios and other leading men were sei...

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Image: Map created from DEMIS Mapserver, which are public domain. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cunda Island: Strangers Who Stayed

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Commons-Fronobulax, CC BY-SA 3.0. After the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the last Greek islanders were forced to leave for a Greece most had never seen. Into their emptied houses came Cretan Turks and Muslims expelled from nearby Lesbos, people who had themselves ...

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Image: Commons-Fronobulax | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cunda Island: What the Restorers Saved

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antoloji, CC BY-SA 4.0. The island's great landmark is the Taxiarchis Church, the Metropolitan cathedral the Moschonisi Greek Orthodox congregation built in 1873, dedicated to the archangels. Converted to a mosque in 1927 and shattered by a 1944 earthquake, it stood abandoned for decades. Then the Rahmi...

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Image: Antoloji | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cunda Island: Cunda Today

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 2.5. Reach Cunda now and it feels like the platonic Aegean resort: cats dozing in alleys, windmills bright against the blue, restaurants spilling onto the waterfront. A bridge and a late-1960s causeway tie the island to the mainland through Lale Island, the first such crossing of a st...

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Image: CC BY-SA 2.5