A second airport, equipped to handle jumbo jets, is under construction and will make Rhodes the only resort island of its size to be served by two international airfields. All things combine to make Rhodes a super star tourist centre: its medieval, walled city, its felicitous climate, its good beaches, varied scenery, and its swinging night life (a gambling casino, discotheques, boites, and nightclubs).
Last summer’s panic over Cyprus produced Rhodes’ first setback in tourism in a decade. The war scare frightened most visitors away at the height of the season. Many hotels and shops had to close for lack of business, a situation that was later exacerbated by the general business recession of 1974-75. The island went into a decline from which it has begun to recover only now. The tourists are back, but in roughly half the numbers that were seen during the boom years.
Rhodes, though, has known adversity before. Its people have survived much worse than the present tension with Turkey, which sits only twenty miles away — in full view of the island. The history of the island is a tempestuous one, full of the sound and fury of wars, pillages, occupations. Ί do not know in the whole world a more excellent strategic position, nor a more beautiful sky, nor a more smiling and fecund soil,’ wrote Lamartine in his Voyage en Orient (1835). A succession of colonizers — Minoan Cretans, soldiers from Attica and the Peloponnese, the aggressive Dorians — fought each other over the island’s favours. They were followed in later centuries by the Byzantines, the Knights of St. John, and the Turks, who wrested the walled city from the Knights in the great siege of 1.522. For almost four centuries Rhodes was a Turkish province. Then the Italians were awarded the island as one of the spoils of World War I. In 1948, after having been liberated by British troops, Rhodes was once more united with Greece after a lapse of two thousand years.
Most of the modern sections of Rhodes were built by the Italians. Believing, in his final egomania, that he was descended from the Knights of St. John, Mussolini restored the old town and built the new as a seignorial retreat for his retirement. World War II and the defeat of the Italians put an end to that fantasy.
The Knights’ old town is a large medieval quarter inside a fortification of towers and ramparts that many architects consider the best of its kind ever built. The heavy Gothic buildings overlaid with influences — Norman, Venetian, Byzantine and Tudor — from the Knights’ native lands, fuse into a strongly masculine style suitable to the Knights. Light playing on the squares and streets transforms them into gold in the sun and grey-mauve in the shadows. The cobbled Street of the Knights, lined by the Inns of the ‘Tongues’ or ethnic groups, rises to the Grand Master’s Palace. The Knights’ compound also contains the old Turkish town, a labyrinth of narrow streets interspersed with mosques and minarets, markets, fountains, and shops. Once upon a time this section of Rhodes belonged to the Levant. There was a Jewish quarter with Sephardic tradesmen and craftsmen. They contributed to the bazaar-like atmosphere in which saddlers, blacksmiths and vendors of gooey sweets bumped shoulders with dealers in gold and silver. The whole life of the quarter was a bouillabaisse of spicy sights, sounds and smells which could be concocted only in the Orient.
Today, however, things have changed. The Jewish quarter is gone. Its four thousand inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz and liquidated when the Germans took over Rhodes after the capitulation of the Italian Fascists in 1943. The rest of the old town has gone honky-tonk. The bootmakers and blacksmiths have given way to an endless series of shops selling FURS PALSAR PULZE. The ‘factory representatives’ of Rhodian-made pottery have pushed out the tinsmiths and tailors. The waiters in ‘typical’ Greek tavernas address you in German and Finnish.
The Mandraki, the broad esplanade overlooking the old harbour of Rhodes and its three Byzantine windmills, no longer has its Colossus, but at its entrance are two columns adorned with statues of the lovely gazelles of the island. Nearby are gardens ablaze with bougainvillea, hibiscus and oleander. In the evening you can sit at a waterfront cafe over an ouzo and watch the harbour catch the colours of the dying sun. (‘Elsewhere the sun just sets,’ someone has written. ‘In Rhodes it is a drama in colour.’) The harbour is a busy, sprightly place, filled as it is with charter and private yachts, tour boats and fishing trawlers. Traffic is heavy, jukeboxes blare, and the sport of tourist and native alike is to sit out under the stars and people-watch until the early hours.
Inevitably, the question is asked: what happened to the immense bronze figure of the Colossus? While there is no accurate information regarding its size, we know from ancient records why it was built, who erected it, and also some details as to its size. After Demetrios Poliorketes’ unsuccessful siege of Rhodes in 304 B.C., the inhabitants, out of gratitude to their god, Apollo Helios, decided to erect some permanent memorial to the event. Having been presented by Demetrios with the engines of war used in the siege, the islanders sold these for 300 talents, and handed the sum to Chares the Lindian, who was charged with the construction of the 105-foot-high statue of the sun-god.
The Colossus took twelve years to build and stood for fifty-six years, until 227 B.C., when an earthquake tumbled it into the harbour. Money was donated by friendly powers to reconstruct the city and raise the Colossus. As so frequently happens in the Levant, the funds provided were spent upon other things, and the Rhodians, to escape reproach, made the excuse that an oracle had forbidden them to restore the monument. So it was that the fallen Colossus lay untouched for 900 years, a marvel to all who visited the island. It is believed that eventually the Saracens, after their capture of Rhodes, demolished the fallen statue and sold its fragments for junk. According to Gibbon, ‘They [the massy trunk and huge fragments] were collected by the diligence of the Saracens and sold to a Jewish merchant of Edessa who is said to have laden nine hundred camels with the weight of the brass metal.’
Rhodes was, in the distant past, not only one of the birthplaces of mankind, but the cradle of the gods. Restless, seafaring and adventure-loving, the Rhodians, who were brothers to the founders of the Hellenic civilizations, took part in the siege of Troy under the great Agamemnon. The geographer, Strabo, called Rhodes the most beautiful city in the Greco-Roman world. The young Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius and Cicero all made carefree student visits to the sun island.
For most of this century Rhodes has been petted and pampered like a courtesan, prepared for a life of compliance and pleasure. The Italians did much to beautify Rhodes. They encouraged tourism, built a deluxe hotel (the Hotel des Roses) which now, alas, stands empty and forgotten, modern taste having favoured hotels in the unisex Scandinavian style. The Italians can also take credit for many of the gardens, parks and farms on the island, and for the first paved roads linking Rhodes to villages such as Lindos and Kamiros. They also restored many antiquities, though often with florid taste. At the same time, they delivered a vindictive blow to the Greek culture by suppressing ancient privileges, expropriating land, taxing inordinately, interfering with civil liberties and religious and educational institutions.
Alien rulers had tried to tear Rhodians from their Greek ways since the fifth century B.C. Today Rhodians still speak Greek, worship in Greek Orthodox churches, and keep many of their old Greek customs. While mass tourism has injected a synthetic strain into the bloodstream of Rhodes city, much of the rest of the island remains truly Greek.
Topography has helped, of course. The city is located at one end of the island and contains all but two of the island’s 125 hotels. The tourist buses and rental cars trundle out on one of two roads. Most go to Lindos, on the east coast, some to Petaloudes (the Valley of the Butterflies) and to the ancient ruins of Kamiros on the west.
Beyond that, as far as organized tours go, there is nothing. Yet the island is sixty-five miles long, and its tallest mountain almost 4,000 feet high. Hidden treasure, if you are prepared to look for it.
Remember, only about half the roads are paved: the gravel is well maintained but formidably dusty in summer. South of Lindos, one is completely alone. Stop along the way and all is silence, except for the manic humming of the cicadas, a flock of goats tinkling past, their unseen shepherd chanting, ‘Heyp, heyp, heyp’. Overhead a hawk may wheel hungrily in the sky. A breeze brings the scent of wild flowers and basil and a whiff of the Aegean. This vast section of the island is untamed and undomesticated. The people are tough and honest, the men masculine. The old life persists, superstitions abound (there is talk of demons haunting the hills), traditional remedies are bandied about, peasant remedies respected. (Cure for a cold: rub a clump of sage between the hands and inhale its aroma for a day.) In Lindos one can also find much that is preternaturally beautiful, providing one can fight past the women in doorways peddling Aegean schlock(i.e. Rhodian pottery, Cretan sweaters, Mykonos shirts). The village, a car-free archaeological preserve, is full of specimens of the architecture of the Knights. The narrow, dung-stained, cobblestoned streets, with arched passages, and the Gothic houses with ornamented faces, are a living reminder of what a fortress-town used to be like. Many of the houses, built for members of the Order, have been restored by their present occupants, mostly wealthy Italians from Milan, and by a sprinkling of writers and painters from the permanent foreign colony living in Lindos.
When I first arrived in Lindos fifteen years ago, few of the houses had electricity or running water. When my wife wanted water to wash dishes or laundry, she stepped to the cistern and hauled up a bucketful of rainwater. For drinking water, we would go down to the village square and fill a jug from the fountain. We cooked on kerosene, read by the light of lanterns, and slept on a banka—a wooden sleeping-platform. In those days houses rented for ten dollars a month, meat could be had only on Sundays, and bottled milk was as rare and expensive as champagne.
Today, all that has changed. Lindos has been discovered, along with Rhodes itself. Thousands of tourists pour into the village by tour bus every day and in their wake has come progress: we enjoy electricity and hot water, a wide range of goods in the shops, and a daily garbage collection. We even have a telephone and television set!
The popularity of Lindos has pushed the rents up to six and seven hundred dollars a month (in season), but it’s still possible to find a reasonable pension or room in the village. Staples such as bread and cheese, fruit and wine are still cheap; the sun and sea are free, and the acropolis is right where it was 4000 years ago, poised 400 feet above the town on a stone slab jutting out into the sea. The visible remains of the temple date back to the time of Alexander the Great, when the acropolis was a religious centre, one of the most important and impressive shrines in the Mediterranean. The Lindos acropolis is one of the superb vantage points in the Aegean.
On the drive from Rhodes to Lindos one heads through countryside which alternates between steep twisting hills and flat valleys and fields. Women working in the fields wear goatskin leggings as protection against poisonous snakes and painful thorns. One of the highest summits on this stretch is Mt. Tsambika, about which a legend still persists on the island. All the women who cannot have babies go barefoot up the mountain on the appropriate saint’s day and spend the night praying. The children resulting from the pilgrimage are named either Tsambiko or Tsambika, depending on the child’s sex.
Last year a group of some two-dozen childless Japanese couples made the trek up the mountain and evidently enough of them became pregnant over the winter for the word to go out at home. This year something like a hundred more couples are due in from Japan to have a go at the Rhodian rites of fertility. The question remains: How do you say Tsambika in Japanese?
Practically every stretch of beach on the east side of Rhodes has a small, thatch roofed, waterfront taverna. Here one can dine on fresh fish (expensive), drink ouzo or retsina (cheap), and watch the blondes from Scandinavia and Bavaria prance and play. Near Mt. Tsambika there is a beach where, as the Rhodians put it, ‘the Swedes go nudist’.
All along this side of Rhodes are cliffs and headlands which some moviegoers will remember from The Guns of Navarone, filmed on Rhodes fifteen years ago. In fact, the star of the film, Anthony Quinn, owns some beachfront property at Cape Ladiko, about halfway between Rhodes and Lindos.
South of Lindos, the beaches are bigger and emptier, the tavernas fewer and further between. The extreme tip of the island is about an hour away. This is Cape Prassonisi, which lies just off the farming village of Katavia. The setting is remarkable, for the hills sloping down to the beach are covered with slate-grey olive trees, some dating back to pre-Christian times, and with grapevines and wheat fields and orange and lemon orchards. The air is clear and sweet, the beaches are white and silent. There is not another tourist or car in sight.
The western side of the island is the most rugged and dramatic: fierce, rocky hills, a hard surf crashing against cliff-faces and barren beaches. Here the meltemi always blows and the olive and fruit trees are bent over, like aged men, from the force of the wind. Most of the island’s tomatoes and watermelons come from this corner of the island, which is about as far removed from tourism as the mountains of Macedonia. Another former monastery dominates this coastline — Monolithos, perched on a rock looking across the channel to the tiny island of Halkis. To watch the sun setting from here in summer is to glimpse paradise.
Rhodes city offers aesthetic delights. There is a nifty little aquarium and several museums full of artifacts and relics from the glorious bygone days. Students of architecture will find much of interest in the old Turkish quarter. There is a nightly ‘Sound and Light’ performance under the Grand Masters’ Palace, and a folk-dance show in the theatre out in Rodini Park (also the home of the local wine festival).
So much for the tame side of Rhodes after dark. Most tourists head for the gaming tables at the Grand Hotel, or to a nightclub to hear bouzouki music and to dance the boogaloo with a Viking goddess. Rhodes also has some raunchy sea-side cabarets, complete with B-girls and prostitutes, female and male alike. There is no question that Rhodes city has charm and ambience, a life force even though it may be something of a Luna Park. Everywhere music pours out from radios and jukeboxes and cassettes. The night sky glitters with billions of stars, the air is savoury with the snfell of grilled fish and octopus. Children try to sell you chiclets, old men lottery tickets. The shopkeepers beckon, the restaurants have scrawled the price of lobster on their billboards and, out at sea, half a dozen cruise ships lie at anchor, gaily lit up with blazing electric lights like a fairytale city.
The Knights of St. John, after eight years in exile, were finally given the islands of Malta and Gozo by Charles V of Spain as a new home for their Order,’ writes Ernie Bradford in The Companion Guide to the Greek Islands. Tt is said that when they sailed across from Sicily in the autumn of 1530 and saw the barren limestone islands of the Maltese archipelago, they wept, remembering Rhodes. It is not difficult to understand their feelings.’
