For ancient Greeks, the island was sacred to Hephaestus, god of metallurgy, who—as he tells himself in Iliad I.590ff—fell on Lemnos when Zeus hurled him headlong out of Olympus.

There, he was cared for by the Sinties, according to Iliad, or by Thetis (Apollodorus, Bibliotheca I:3.5), and there with a Thracian nymph Cabiro (a daughter of Proteus) he fathered a tribe called the Kaberoi.

According to Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica the Argonauts landing soon after found only women in the island, ruled by Hypsipyle, daughter of the old king Thoas.

From the Argonauts and the Lemnian women were descended the race called Minyans, whose king Euneus, son of Jason and Hypsipyle, sent wine and provisions to the Achaeans at Troy.

According to Sophocles, he lived beside Mount Hermaeus, which Aeschylus makes one of the beacon points to flash the news of Troy's downfall home to Argos.

The ruins of the oldest human settlement in the Aegean Islands found so far have been unearthed in archaeological excavations on Lemnos by a team of Greek, Italian and American archaeologists at the Ouriakos site on the Louri coast of Fyssini in Moudros municipality.

The excavation began in early June 2009 and the finds brought to light, consisting mainly of high quality stone tools, are from the Epipaleolithic Period, indicating a settlement of hunters and gatherers and fishermen of the 12th millennium BC.

[citation needed] In August and September 1926, members of the Italian School of Archaeology at Athens conducted trial excavations on the island.

[10] The overall purpose of the excavations was to shed light on the island's pre-Hellenic "Etrusco-Pelasgian" civilization, following the discovery of the "Lemnos stele", bearing an inscription philologists related to the Etruscan language.

Coins from Hephaestia are found in considerable number, and various types including the goddess Athena with her owl, native religious symbols, the caps of the Dioscuri, Apollo, etc.

On a barren island near Lemnos there was an altar of Philoctetes with a brazen serpent, bows and breastplate bound with strips, to remind of the sufferings of the hero.

Leonardo retained the title of megadux of the Latin Empire and half the island with the capital, Kastro, while his sisters and their husbands received one quarter each with the fortresses of Moudros and Kotsinos.

[20] Following the fall of Constantinople (1453), and thanks to the intercession of Michael Critobulus, Sultan Mehmed II recognized Dorino I Gattilusio's possession of Lemnos and Thasos in exchange for an annual tribute of 2,325 gold coins.

[20] Pope Callixtus III (in office 1455–1458) hoped to establish a new military order on the island, which controlled the exit of the Dardanelles, but nothing came of it as Isma'il Bey soon recovered Lemnos for the Sultan.

[22] In 1464, during the First Ottoman–Venetian War, the Venetians seized Lemnos and other former Gattilusi possessions, but the area reverted to Ottoman control in accordance with the 1479 Treaty of Constantinople.

At this time, the administration of the island was also reformed and brought in line with Ottoman practice, with a governor (voevoda), judge (kadi), and elders (kodjabashis) heading the local Greek inhabitants.

The Ottomans under Topal Mehmed Pasha recovered it barely a year later, on 15 November 1657, after besieging the capital of Kastro for 63 days.

In July 1770, Russian forces under Count Alexei Grigoryevich Orlov besieged Kastro for three months during the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774.

[22][23] The French scholar Vital Cuinet, in his 1896 work La Turquie d'Asie, recorded a population of 27,079, of which 2,450 were Muslims and the rest Greek Orthodox.

The Greek navy under Rear Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis captured it after a brief action without any casualties from the Ottoman garrison, who were returned to Anatolia.

[24] Moudros Bay became a forward anchorage for the Greek fleet, which enabled it to keep watch on the Dardanelles and prevent a foray by the Ottoman Navy into the Aegean.

Thus the Ottomans were prevented from supplying and reinforcing their land forces in Macedonia by sea, a critical factor in the success of the Balkan League in the war.

After the Red Army victory in the Russian Civil War in 1920, many Kuban Cossacks fled the country to avoid persecution from the Bolsheviks.

A notable evacuation point was the Greek island of Lemnos where 18,000 Kuban Cossacks landed, though many later died of starvation and disease.

During World War II, the island was occupied by the Germans on 25 April 1941, in the wake of the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Greece, by the Infanterie Regiment 382/164 Inf.Division under the command of Oberst Wilhelm-Helmuth Beukemann.

These included many German and Austrian antifascist political prisoners enrolled by force, many of whom then joined the Greek People's Liberation Army (ELAS), such as Wolfgang Abendroth.

The municipal units of Atsiki, Moudros, Myrina and Nea Koutali are subdivided into the following communities (constituent villages in brackets): Atsiki Moudros Myrina Nea Koutali Local specialties include: Lemnos has a strong husbandry tradition, being famous for the Kalathaki Limnou[27] (PDO), a cheese made from sheep and goat milk; as well as for the Melichloro or Melipasto cheese and its yogurt.

The main crops are wheat, barley, sesame; in fact, Lemnos was Constantinople's granary after the Byzantine Empire lost its Anatolian possessions in the 1320s.

Of the economically active population, 17.9% worked in agriculture, 5.3% in light manufacturing, 11% in construction, 6.7% in hotels and restaurants, and the rest in other lines of business.

In God of War, at some point in the story Kratos finds a bottle of Lemnian wine, which he claims to come from Lemnos, a place close to where he was born.