This is the military cemetery of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Portianou village, where 347 people of the British Commonwealth are buried and there is also the memorial of the victims of HMS Endymion. Initially, in August 1915, the British used the area behind the church of the Assumption of the Virgin and the village cemetery as a burial site. They continued to bury their dead there until August 1920. Today, Portianos Cemetery is one of the two official cemeteries of the British Commonwealth in Lemnos, where 347 burials of Commonwealth soldiers from the operations of Gallipoli had taken place.
The cemetery itself has an irregular shape, which looks like a trapezoid, something that was dictated by the geographical location and the neighborhood with the village church. Most burials are in rows in the front of the cemetery, but there are two more with different layouts on the other side of the site.
The Cross of Sacrifice is not an autonomous structure, but a sculpture inserted in construction that houses the Altar of Memory and it consists of two columns, which are crowned with a circular arch and a small roof. In general, the cemetery area is neither covered as a whole, as in the British cemeteries of Macedonia nor do the burials follow a strict military order. Morphologically, the location but also the Altar and the Cross, are more similar to the constructions of the cemeteries of Gallipoli.
The center is dominated by a large pine tree, and there is a monument in the vicinity for four sailors of the warship HMS Endymion, who were killed in service in 1918. It has the shape of a four-sided column and its top is crowned by an anchor tied with a rope to a cross. In 2019 a plaque was erected in honor of the nurses from Canada.
