GREEKS IN LESINA
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name may not be Greek after all, but Slav, derived from lés, a wood, or building wood ; lesèna, the woody one ; and it may indeed have been at one time a SevSpr/ea-aa vrjaos. Little enough of wood remains now on these Dalmatian islands ; most are bare and desolate grey rock running down into the sea, with here and there a few clumps of pines on the lower slopes, hardly any houses and the most scanty cultivation. We pass the mouth of a deep fiord or inlet, at the extreme end of which lies the Cittavecchia, claiming, perhaps without warrant, to be the ancient capital. The coasting steamers put in to Citta vecchia. After rounding the island’s westernmost point we come to the real, or at least the present, capital, the town of Lesina.
  Lesina was the Greek colony of Pharos, peopled from Pharos in the Cyclades. It can boast remains that may be even earlier than the Greek period, the Cyclopean—if they are Cyclopean— walls of Cittavecchia. At all events the Greeks were there in the fourth century b.c. Then came the Syracusan, still Greek, supremacy, when the Tyrant Dionysius sacked Lesina, and it was then, probably, that véos 4>a/)oç, the present Cittavecchia, Was founded by the refugees. Little or nothing of the Greek epoch survives. The island became an