Messolonghi image Timeless life

Confined traces

In this island of a very large building stock inherited by the Italian Occupation, the then Ministry of Hygiene found a way to “solve” the overcrowding in Greece’s public psychiatric hospitals.

Direction - Montage
Stratis Vogiatzis



In this island of a very large building stock inherited by the Italian Occupation, the then Ministry of Hygiene found a way to “solve” the overcrowding in Greece’s public psychiatric hospitals. In 1957, the idea was formed to turn the empty buildings of the Italian admiralty in Leros into a colony of psychiatric patients in order to occupy them with farming tasks. Thus begins the mass dispatch –“shipping”- of people with severe mental illnesses in tank landing ships of the Navy. In the early 1980s, the first accusations burst about the poor living conditions of the patients confined in the psychiatric hospital of Leros. These accusations led to the cessation of patients’ transportation to Leros by order of the Ministry of Health in 1982. Those buildings gradually got deserted and delivered to the ravages of time. But the inpatients’ traces, their paintings and their petrified cries remained, simply to remind this black page in the history of mental health in our country.