Modern Greek bureaucracy and petty partisan interests appear to have again reared their “ugly head”, with the eight residents of the remote isle of Levitha essentially considered as “non entities” by the municipality Leros, part of a bid to characterize the isle as uninhabited.
The reason, according to reports, is the municipality’s decision to offer the isle — known as Lebynthos in antiquity and even mention by Ovid — as a site for wind mill power production.
However, Dimitris Kambosos and his eight relatives live on the island that has hosted members of the Kambosos family since 1820, a refuge for poor Aegean fishermen and a their families before even the Greek War of Independence and 10 years before the formal establishment of the modern Greek state in 1830.

The isle lies 24 nautical miles from its nearest inhabited neighbor.
The problem faced by the Kambosos family, fishermen who also grow their own produce, raise livestock and open a small taverna for passengers of sailboats that dock on the isle in the summer months, began in 2013 when a private company requested the leasing of five uninhabited isles from the Leros municipality in order to construct wind farms. Another “snafu” was the failure of census takers in 2011 to actually … travel to the isle, instead taking a “telephone census” instead. That oversight result in the last census showing no residents on Lavitha.
Another sector of the public sector, however, the defence ministry, maintains that the isle cannot be characterized as uninhabited, given that international law — especially UNCLOS — does not recognize a right of continental shelf and EEZ to islets without populations. As most legal scholars know, Greece — and every other EU country — is a signatory to UNCLOS, but Turkey is not.

Besides Dimitris Kambosos, the picturesque yet rugged isle is home to his wife, Irini, children Maria, Tassos, Manolis, the latter’s wife, Chrysovalanto, and the family’s three children, Dimitris, 6, Katerina, 7, and Irini, 12.
The island and the family were, in fact, the subject of a 1999 documentary by Angelos Kovotsos, entitled “Evga Ilie, Katse Ilie” (Come out sun, stand there sun), shown on state broadcaster ERT in 1999.
The isle was fortified by the Italian army during WWII to warn of an Allied attack on the nearby naval base on Leros and then occupied by the Germans for the remainder of the war. As Kambosos relates, his family nursed several war wounded and even fled to the rocky hills during a German bombardment of facilities.