page_title: Leros
section_title: Venetian and Ottoman Era
hierarchical_section_title: Leros / History / Venetian and Ottoman Era
caption_attribution_description: English: Church of Agia Marina, Leros Ελληνικά: Ιερός Ναός Αγίας Μαρίνας
context_page_description: Leros is a Greek island and municipality in the Dodecanese in the southern Aegean Sea. It lies 317 kilometres from Athens's port of Piraeus, from which it can be reached by an 8.5-hour ferry ride, and about 20 miles to Turkey. Leros is part of the Kalymnos regional unit. The island has been also called in Italian: Lero.
context_section_description: During the Byzantine Age, the island was incorporated into the Theme of Samos. During the thirteenth century, the island was occupied by the Genoese and then by the Venetians. In the year 1309, the Knights of St John seized and fortified Leros. In 1505, the Ottoman Admiral Kemal Reis, with three galleys and seventeen other warships, besieged the castle but could not capture it. The operation was repeated in 1508 with more ships, but again nothing was achieved.
  Legend has it that then the island was rescued by the only surviving knight, barely 18 years old. He dressed women and children in the armor of the dead defenders, convincing the Ottomans that the garrison of Leros was still strong. Finally, on 24 December 1522, following the siege of Rhodes, a treaty was signed between Sultan Suleiman and the Grand Master of the Knights, Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, and Leros, along with all the Aegean possessions of the Order, passed into Ottoman hands which ruled the island with brief interruptions during a period of four hundred years.
  During the Ottoman rule, and along with the other islands, Leros enjoyed a privileged regime, with partial autonomy and self–government. During the Greek Revolution of 1821, the island was liberated and became an important base for the re-supplying of the Greek Navy. Administratively, it came under the jurisdiction of the Temporary Committee of the Eastern Sporades.
  With the Treaty of London, on 3 February 1830, however, which determined the borders of the newly established Greek state, the freed islands of the Eastern Sporades were given over to the Ottoman Empire again. According to the Ottoman General Census of 1881/82-1893, the kaza of Leros had a total population of 6.754, consisting of 6.623 Greeks, 18 Muslims and 113 foreign citizens. In the "Diary of the Prefecture of the Archipelago" of 1886, Leros, along with the islands of Patmos, Lipsos and Fournoi, belonged to the Ottomans. The island's administrative council was made up of both Greeks and Turks.
caption: The church of Agia Marina
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