13 Facts About Lemnos

Lemnos or Limnos is a Greek island in the northern part of the Aegean Sea.

Lemnos is mostly flat, but the west, and especially the northwest part, is rough and mountainous.

The hillsides afford pasture for sheep, and Lemnos has a strong husbandry tradition, being famous for its Kalathaki Limnou, a cheese made from sheep and goat milk and melipasto cheese, and for its yogurt.

The main crops are wheat, barley, sesame; in fact Lemnos was Constantinople's granary after the Byzantine Empire lost its Anatolian possessions in the 1320s.

Lemnos produces honey, but, as is the case with most products of a local nature in Greece, the produced quantities are little more than simply sufficient for the local market.

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The name Lemnos is said by Hecataeus to have been applied in the form of a title to Cybele among the Thracians.

The overall purpose of the excavations was to shed light on the island's pre-Hellenic "Etrusco-Pelasgian" civilization, following the discovery of the "Lemnos stele", bearing an inscription philologists related to the Etruscan language.

The results of the excavations indicate that the Early Iron Age inhabitants of Lemnos could be a remnant of a Mycenaean population and, in addition, the earliest attested reference to Lemnos is the Mycenaean Greek ra-mi-ni-ja, "Lemnian woman", written in Linear B syllabic script.

Miltiades later returned to Athens and Lemnos was an Athenian possession until the Macedonian empire absorbed it.

Pliny the Elder writes about a labyrinth on Lemnos which was built by the architects Zmilis, Rhoecus and Theodorus, who were all natives of Lemnos.

Under Ottoman rule, Lemnos initially formed part of the sanjaks of Gallipoli or Mytilene under the Eyalet of the Archipelago, but was constituted as a separate sanjak in the reforms of the mid-19th century, at the latest by 1846.

Present municipality of Lemnos was formed on the merger of the following four former municipalities, each of which became municipal units, following the 2011 local government reform:.

Lemnos Province, abolished in 2006, comprised the same territory as the present regional unit.