Mithymna is also the seat of the municipality as well as the province. It is also known by the name

Molyvos or Molivos used under the Ottoman Empire (CE). Mithymna is located NE of Eressos,

N of Plomari and NW of Mytilene. The town (pop. 1,497 at 2001 census) is on the northern part

of the island, just some 6 km north of the popular beach town of Petra. One of the most

noticeable features of the town is the old Genoese fortress on the hill in the middle of the town.

The Municipality of Mithymna stretches eastward from the town along the northern part of the island;

it is the island's smallest municipality in land area at 50.166 km², and the second-smallest in the prefecture

(after Agios Efstratios). Its population was 2,433 at the 2001 census. The next largest towns in the municipality

are Argennos (pop. 240) and Sykaminea (207).

As Methymna, the city was once the prosperous second city of Lesbos, with a founding myth that identified

an eponymous Methymna (Greek: Μήθυμνα), the daughter of Macar and married to the personification of Lesbos;

this mythologized social geography appears on the city's coinage [1].) In the Peloponnesian War, Methymna

played an important role (Thucydides, III, ii, 18; vi, 85; vii, 57; Xenophon, Hellen., I, vi, 14). The poets praised

the excellent wine of Methymna (Virgil, Georgics, II, 90; Ovid, Ars Amatoria, I, 57; Horace, Satire II, 8, 50;

Odes, I, 17, 21).

Methymna was the birthplace of the legendary poet Arion and probably also of the historian Myrsilus.

Here was the shrine of the hero Palamedes, mentioned in the early third-century

AD Life of Apollonius of Tyana (book v.13). As a Christian city, Methymna was the seat of a bishop. In 640,

Methymna was mentioned in the Ecthesis, pseudographically attributed to Epiphanius of Salamis,

as an autocephalous archdiocese, and around 1084, it was made a metropolitan see under Alexius I Comnenus.

The Fourth Crusade brought Latin control, on the strength of which the Roman Catholic Church maintains

a purely titular see of Methymna; there were 40 Roman Catholics in 1908. (CE) The fortress was probably

constructed after the mid-13th century,as a defense against Franks and Turks alike.

The Ottomans took the city in 1462. As Molivo under the Ottoman Empire, the city was a kaza of the

sanjak of Metelin in the vilayet of Rhodes. After the defeat of the Ottomans in the First Balkan War

(1913), Greece annexed Lesbos in 1914.

Useful Phones for Molivos (Mithymna) Town Hall                    +30-22530-71313 Police                         +30-22530-71222  Port Police                  +30-22530-71715  Medical Office             +30-22530-71333 Tourist Information      +30-22530-71347 Aegean Airlines           +30-22510-61120 Olympic Airlines          +30-22510-61802

Text from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methymna