It has area of 1,633 km (631 sq mi), with approximately 400 kilometres (249 miles) of coastline. It is separated from Asia Minor (now Turkey) by the narrow Mytilini Strait. The island is widely known as the home of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, from whose association with homosexuality the word lesbian derives its modern meaning. It is also sometimes called the "Island of the Poets". The name Lesbos means "forested," or "woody." But the word ‘lesbian’ is derived from that same name because of the writings of Sappho.
The writer Sappho has been perceived as other than heterosexual, though many of her works have been lost. However, there is a sculpted head of a woman from the Glyptothek in Munich, Germany, identified as "probably" a copy of Silanion's 4th-century BC imaginative portrait of Sappho ; there is a vase with the image of Sappho, circa 510 BC, in the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland.
This little island was surrounded by no less than six countries where the early Chistian churches were planted, and the Good News was spreading westward from Israel to Asia Minor (Turkey), Greece, Macedonia, Thrace (now Bulgaria and Romania), eastward to Syria and Jordan, the north of Africa (Egypt and Ethiopia), the south of Russia (north of Turkey), and then further west to Germania (Germany), Gaul (France), Spain, Italy, Britain, Belgae (Belgium) and Hibernia (Ireland).
Then it would spread further west to the Americas, including Canada and Latin America, and further east to Asia including Japan and Australia, further south into South Africa.
Lesbos prospered from trade, and Mytilene was considered the busiest port in the Aegean Sea. And it later had both Christian and Muslim populations.
THERE IS STILL WORK TO BE DONE IN THAT REGION.