Although at first the passengers took the message personally, wondering why Rhodians didn’t want a tired boatload of over-nighters from Athens, the consensus soon was that of course the sentiment applied only to Americans, who intended to put a base on Rhodes. “What intention, what base?” were questions left unanswered, but the theory satisfied most of them, and they debarked, thinking only about where they were going to find a place to stay on this island which is the most popular vacation spot in Greece.
By mid-day, they knew better. The town was shut down in a general strike. Not only was it almost impossible to find a room, but just about every shop and restaurant was closed too. The Rhodians were protesting what some of them called the invasion of the Turks. The crowd at the harbor awaited a Turkish cruise boat called the “Gemlik”, which had sailed that morning from Marmari on the inauguration of a new route opened up by recent agreements on tourism signed by the General Secretary of EOT and his Turkish counterpart. For years now, Greek cruise ships have put in at Turkish ports on their Aegean tours, and caiques ply regularly in the summer months between the Eastern Sporades, the Dodecanese, and the Turkish coast. According to the Greek government, the “Gemlik’s” run, a daily round-trip between Rhodes and Marmari, was just an extension of these already-existing contacts.
Despite placating noises from Athens, stifled somewhat by the July newspaper strike, the Rhodians were whipped into a fury. By mid-afternoon, the “Gemlik” appeared off the Commercial Harbor, an unprepossessing craft about the size of a Saronic ferryboat, its most striking asset the brilliant red Turkish flag. It dawdled offshore, at first hiding behind several large Greek cruise ships ((tto unload its passengers onto them,” went the rumor), later just loitering. The landing dock was full of demonstrators, who were tightly controlled by an equally large mob of policemen. Occasionally a wave of anxiety would sweep over the crowd, and from a vantage point on Fort St. Nicholas, spectators could see them peel off in ripples to wash up against the ranks of policemen, then retreat to their cordon sanitaire. Some had picked up great planks of wood from a pile in the freight area of the dock, presumably comforted by the weight and size. But nothing more happened that day, apart from the production of rumors, which swept through the city gates and into the streets and back alleys of the medieval town, where the idled population sat on their stoops, exchanging bits of information periodically relayed to them by protesters returning for food or a rest. “The first arm of the invasion. Once more I will lose my house to the Turks,” said one woman, who indeed looked old enough to remember Rhodes before the Italians took over in 1912. “The ship is armed, and loaded with infiltrators and agents,” went another interpretation, and “The Turks get away with anything they want.”
The “Gemlik” still lay off Rhodes at nightfall. Around 3 a.m. the uneasy town was aroused by church bells and shouts: “The Turks have landed. They’re unloading the ship.” The battle of Rhodes was on. Several hundred people young enough and angry enough to move at that hour streamed down to the port and joined those who had kept the all-night vigil. Frustrated by the police and driven back from the landing dock, the demonstrators attacked some confiscated cars standing in the customs house parking lot. By the next morning, the protesters occupied a small stretch of harbor in front of the medieval walls. Boat traffic from Athens was cancelled, and the sense of crisis grew. By this time, most of the protesters bore proudly the traces of battle – vaseline or zinc oxide ointment striped onto their faces to nullify, so it is said, the effects of tear gas. Now the activists could be singled out, and as one observer-participant noted, of the several hundred demonstrators, only a handful were over 20.
By now the stoop-sitters in the medieval town were beginning to turn against the demonstrators, and one could sense a developing class war. The popular theory was that 1 the riots were engineered, by rich tourist-shop owners, who feared they would lose business to their Turkish brethren in Marmari. The Turks, so the hypothesis went, would undermine the Rhodian economy by underselling the Greeks. Grumbled the back-streeters, “They are sending our children to fight for them. Why don’t they just lower their prices? Everyone knows how they got rich by robbing the tourists, and now they’re worried the tourists will find out and go to Marmari to shop.” At the same time, the back-streeters were afraid. Rumors flew up from the port that several shops of strike-breakers had been burned, and that people had actually been killed. This last tale was fleshed out with vivid “eye-witness” detail of the presumed deaths of one to four people. It was fear now that kept everything closed, and it was hard to find food unless one knew the password to a friendly grocer or restaurateur.
The forces of MAT occupied key positions on the parapets and ramparts of the Knights’ walls. Occasionally a helmet or shield would flash between the crenellations, but the police made their presence known mainly by the tear gas they would lob over the side every few minutes at teasing groups of demonstrators. A strong wind kept the air relatively clean, so that the youths would regroup within seconds of every cannister, shouting and waving their fists at the invisible defenders of the walls, who knew there was no point in chasing their antagonists through the labyrinthine medieval streets, and were content to harass them from their impregnable heights. It was impossible to tell whether the “Gemlik” actually did unload any tourists from Turkey, and one wondered how these presumably hapless passengers felt about being taken on this kind of ride, Rumors claimed many landings, but after the first day the boat no longer hovered offshore. Whatever she did, she did quickly; some said early in the morning, others late at night.
By the third day, with MAT in control of all strategic points, the demonstrators passed a night of fury. They uprooted ancient siege-balls which had last seen action in the defense of Rhodes against Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522, and in a last gesture of defiance attacked the office of the Tourist Police. Then they retired in a final flurry of rumors, which claimed that the Grand Hotel Astir Palace had been smoke-bombed, that the whole harbor was burning, and that the tourists, the booty for which the war was waged, were desperately trying to escape the embattled island. The mayor praised the spirit of his people, who had bravely resisted the impositions of the central government, and pleaded for order. The central government stood fast in its decision to implement the tourist accords. Shops opened, it was still impossible to find a room, and the battle turned into a boycott of the “Gemlik”. No cab-driver would pick up a “Gemlik”-bound tourist, no tour agent would handle bookings, no hotel would take customers in transit to Marmari.
The demonstrations of the previous days had clearly assumed their own momentum, turning into a kind of summer spree, but underneath were serious complaints. According to many Rhodians, the central government had acted in a highhanded manner by signing the tourism accords without consulting them, the people most directly affected. Many feared the economic consequences of opening up an easy route to Turkey, especially if Marmari is developed as a (presumably cheaper) resort area. Of course, defendants of the government position point out that tourists can travel both ways, and that the accessibility of one more tourist attraction, i.e. Turkey, will make Rhodes even more appealing as a holiday center. But the hard fact is that tourism is down this year, and while the Rhodian response may seem paranoid and short-sighted to some, it arises from an understandable concern over their future.
The Loving Part
IT is hard to imagine vendors in Syntagma or at the foot of the Acropolis selling banners and stickers, T-shirts and pins emblazoned with the words “I Love Athens”. “Athens” alone, yes, but the loving part would be open to question.
For New Yorkers, on the contrary, not even liking the city is enough; one has to love it.
On the eve of the opening of the Democratic Convention in early August, the love pitch was being played to the hilt as delegates converged from all parts of the country. Although “New York is going to make you feel at home” was another sales’ approach, a southern delegate arriving at a midtown hotel was heard to admit, “It ain’t much like Plainville, Texas.”
He was right. New York is not like Plainville or any other place, nor, as the Convention opened, was it at its most lovable.
Even Central Park, the chief lungs of the city, seemed short of breath. The park is in the throes of a comprehensive public works program with lakes being dredged, walks relaid and vandalized buildings and fountains being repaired. A prolonged drought has added a withered look to its generally untidy appearance. By comparison the greenery of Athens is neat and lush, its grass watered, its shrubs pruned, its litter picked up. Yet, curiously enough, while Athenians spend so much of their leisure hours trying to get out of their city, New Yorkers use them to stay and enjoy what there is.
In August the sidewalks of New York provide some of the liveliest spectacles in the city with puppet-shows, exhibitions of paintings, quilts and crafts, and unlicensed vendors of fruit, plastic handbags and junk jewelry who rush down side streets with their handcarts at the approach of the police. Most extraordinary is the plethora of musicians. In a single block on Fifth Avenue and Rockefeller Center, at one street corner there was a steel band, at the other an elderly group playing blue-grass music and in the middle, under the bronze statue of Atlas, a third playing Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet.
Unlike Athens, tourism is flourishing in New York this summer. Although the Placement Bureau of the Democratic National Committee had at first overbooked by 4,000 rooms, hotels had little difficulty finding replacement occupancy. Not only have people poured in from all over the country but from Europe as well.
But it was the beribboned, bebuttoned, exotically shod and hatted conventioneers who were most evident in the jammed streets, theaters and restaurants. If the object of these Democratic delegates was to restructure the party it was the business of many New Yorkers to party the structure. At Mama Leone’s, a favorite restaurant for tourists, a flamboyant Middle American delegation noisily enjoyed the New York experience sitting beneath marble busts of Euripides and Sophocles with Greek inscriptions, being entertained by troubadours singing “Never on Sunday” in the traditional Neapolitan manner.
If, in playing host, New Yorkers still felt impelled to think up reasons why the Democratic delegates, too, should love this vulgar, polyglot city, former Senator and UN Ambassador Patrick Moynihan expressed as good a reason as any: As the chief port of immigration in the past, he said, it was where an ancestor of nearly every American today first set foot on the shores of the New World and for that reason alone it could justifiably be called home.
For all its astonishing combination of splendor and squalor New York really is loved and this largely accounts for its unique variety and vitality. If Athenians were as positively committed to their city — and there is no reason why they should not be, for it has enormous potential — the energies they consume complaining of it and trying to get out of it could be channeled into staying in it and improving it.
