Homer wrote in the Iliad: In the depths of the sea on the cliff Between Tenedos and craggy Imbros There is a cave, wide gaping Poseidon who made the earth tremble, stopped the horses there.

[16] The original inhabitants of Imbros were Pelasgians, worshipped Cabeiri, and Hermes as a god of reproduction in ithyphallic form, whence his Carian epithet, 'Ιμβραμος, has been supposed to be derived.

[18] But later, Miltiades conquered the island from Persia after the battle of Salamis; the colony was established about 450 BC, during the first Athenian empire, and was retained by Athens (with brief exceptions) for the next six centuries.

Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian War describes the colonization of Imbros,[19] and at several places in his narrative mentions the contribution of Imbrians in support of Athens during various military actions.

[30] Prior to the Fall of Constantinople, several larger islands south of Imbros were under Genoese rule, part of the territory historically held in the eastern Mediterranean by the independent Maritime Republic of Genoa (1005–1797, thus predating the East–West schism of 1054) a political development emanating from the former territory of the Western Roman Empire, by city-states such as Venice, Pisa and Amalfi.

At the beginning of the 13th century, when the Fourth Crusade and its aftermath temporarily disrupted Venice's relations with the Byzantine Empire, Genoa expanded its influence north of Imbros, into the Black Sea and Crimea.

Ruy González de Clavijo, ambassador to Henry III of Castile to the court of Timur, travelled through the Aegean during his 1403-1406 Embassy to Samarkand, noted the island as being under the rule of the Byzantines.

Michael Critoboulos, a leading Imvrian, and subsequently a chronicler of Mehmet II, organised and facilitated the peaceful surrender of the island to the Ottomans.

The Ottomans, through issuing kanunname and installing local Muslim rulers, attempted to integrate the entirely Orthodox Greek population.

"Although Greek bandits attacked [...] and landed in Imvros and Lemnos in order to take sustenance support, the islanders did not help them so that Ottoman troops drove back the rebellions.

Prominent Ottoman politician, Ismail Qemal Bej Vlora, who spent about a year during the mid-1870s superintending the workings of a lignite mine upon the island, remarked that:"The sole authority in the place was the müdür (a sort of mayor appointed by the Government [whose attributions included tax collection, executing the court sentences, and at times mediation of disputes and pacification of the locals]), who was a charming Albanian, and more like the father of this island family than a representative of government.

There were four or five gendarmes recruited from among the Greeks of the country, who did not even know where their arms were, so little did they ever find need of using them —and it is doubtful if they would have known how to if the occasion had arisen...We passed whole weeks without communication with the outside world.

No telegrams came, nor couriers, nor newspapers, nor anything else to disturb our hermit's life amid this beautiful scenery and among a population that is perhaps the quietest and simplest in the world.

In 1915, Imbros played an important role as a staging post for the allied Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, prior to and during the invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula.

[35] On 20 January 1918, a naval action (see Battle of Imbros (1918)) took place in the Aegean near the island when an Ottoman squadron engaged a flotilla of the British Royal Navy.

[37] Eventually, Greece and the United Kingdom pressured the Germans to support an agreement where the Ottomans would retain Tenedos, Kastelorizo and Imbros and the Greeks would control the other Aegean islands.

During World War I Gallipoli Campaign, the British used the island as a supply base and built a 600-metre-long airstrip for military operations.

After the Greco-Turkish War ended in Greek defeat in Anatolia, and the fall of Lloyd George and his Middle Eastern policies, the western powers agreed to the Treaty of Lausanne with the new Turkish Republic, in 1923.

[40] However shortly after the legislation of "Civil Law" on 26 June 1927 (Mahalli Idareler Kanunu), the rights accorded to the Greek population of Imbros and Tenedos were revoked, in violation of the Lausanne Treaty.

Moreover, the members of the local council were obliged to have adequate knowledge of the Turkish language, which meant that the vast majority of the islanders were excluded.

Furthermore, according to this law, the Turkish government retained the right to dissolve this council and in certain circumstances, to introduce police force and other officials consisting of non-islanders.

Under these conditions the Turkish government approved the appropriation of the 90% of the cultivated areas of the island and the settlement of additional 6,000 ethnic Turks from mainland Turkey.

It was named Fatih Camii (Conqueror's Mosque) and was built on an expropriated Greek Orthodox communal property at the capital of the island.

[8] On the other hand, the indigenous Greek population being deprived of its means of production and facing hostile behaviour from the government and the newly arrived settlers, left its native land.

[8] However, international pressure resulted in Turkey's authorities relaxing some of the previously imposed restrictions in the 2000s, which, combined with efforts of the Imvrian expatriate communities and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, a native of Imbros, allowed the opening of Greek educational establishments on the island as well as the return of some Greeks who had left their native Imbros.

The monument made of two parts connected by seven-meter long walls reminds standing stones in Göbekli Tepe archeological site.

[52] Imbros is mainly of volcanic origin and the highest mountain of the island İlyas Dağ, is an extinct cone-shaped stratovolcano.

This fault zone, which runs from northeastern Anatolia to the northern Aegean Sea, has been responsible for several deadly earthquakes, including in Istanbul, Izmit and Imbros among others, and is a major threat to the island.

The publication, Αμάλθεια stated that: "All the houses in the villages of Παναγία, Γλυκύ, Αγρίδια and Σχοινούδι of Ίμβρος collapsed or suffered cracks from the main earthquake and the three strong aftershocks that followed.

[8] However, large populations of Imbriots reside in Australia, South Africa, Turkey, Egypt, the Americas, and Western Europe.