Spirit of Place: The Island of Rhodes
This Greek isle is blessed by the sun, washed by the waves of time. I found new friends there, and the history of the ancient world.
There are summer nights on Rhodes when all the heat of the day seems to lift at once, as if someone had flung open an enormous window. The flare from Helios’s fiery chariot fades behind an ancient acropolis, leaving the sky an inky magenta. The breezes rise along the foothills, bearing the perfume of wild thyme down to the black waters of the Aegean Sea. If you choose your perch well—the summit of the acropolis, where Greeks and Romans practiced the art of rhetoric, or the pebbled beach that traces the curve of the island’s northern tip, beyond the city walls the Crusaders built—you can see the lights flickering on the neighboring coast of Asia Minor, where the great Ionian cities of Ephesus, Miletus, and Didyma once raised the torches of Greek culture. Floating on the dark sea, lit only by the moon and the constellations dancing overhead, Rhodes seems adrift in time, like a ship searching out the safe harbor of another age.
On just such a June evening, Sotiris Nikolis and I sat on the terrace of the S. Nikolis Hotel, drinking Greek brandy and gazing out over the red-tiled roofs of the Old Town. The stone walls wrapped the city like a blanket around a sleeping child. A gauze of murky shadows fluttered over the cobblestone streets below. In the moonlit harbor the masts of sailboats were clustered in a luminescent thicket.
Sotiris was recounting his life’s story. His brown, bearded face was taut with the effort of the telling, as if this were the first time anyone had asked to hear it. I sat listening, feeling the brandy. Sotiris told me that he had not started out life wanting to run a hotel. Nor had he ever meant to become a plumber. In 1966, when he was ten years old, it was rare to see a tourist on Rhodes, and few of the houses had running water. Like many boys his age, Sotiris had to go to work to help support his family.
His father found him his first job at a cafe in the New Market, next to Mandraki Harbor, where one of the “seven wonders” of the ancient world—the 105 foot bronze Colossus of Rhodes—is said to have stood. Sotiris was no colossus. Had he not been such a small, skinny boy, perhaps he would have become a waiter. But the heavy metal tray, laden with 20 cups of coffee, was as wide as he was tall. Hard as he tried, he could not carry it. So, again with his father’s help, he became a plumber’s apprentice.
A breeze curled around us and sent a shudder through the pink geraniums that Marianne, Sotiris’s Danish wife, had set along the terrace railing. As Sotiris spoke, I performed a silent calculation. He was born in 1956, only nine years after the Western powers, belatedly fulfilling a decades long promise, had given Greece the deed to the Dodecanese Islands, of which Rhodes is the largest.
The islands had languished in Italian hands for most of the first half of the 20th century, and had spent the 400 years before under the dubious guardianship of the Turks. Yet Sotiris was as Greek as the sun-soaked island on which he had lived all his life.
Sotiris and Rhodes grew up together. The tourists began to come at last. Hotels and restaurants sprouted like fungi. Life for the islanders got better, and there was a lot of work for Sotiris. By day he installed pipes and rains. In the evenings, he played his guitar in the nightclubs that were blossoming in the New Town. By 1979 he had saved enough to build his hotel on Ippodamou Street. And as perilous as Greek plumbing can be, the entire time I stayed at Sotiris’s place there never was a problem.
As with most Greek islands, modern tourism did not come to Rhodes until well after World War II. Yet in the days of antiquity, anyone who was anybody found an excuse to stop by. Julius Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, and Cicero came to study at the renowned School of Rhetoric. Virgil praised the island’s wines as fit for the feasts of the gods, and the Roman emperor Nero once talked about abdicating his throne for a life of leisure on Rhodes.
Viewed from above, the island seems to float on the water like an inverted maple leaf. The walled city (also called Rhodes) occupies the stemlike northern promontory, less than ten miles from the shore of Turkey. In the less populated south, a coastal plain slopes gently into the Aegean. Between these extremities stretch two elongated coasts, each of which, at almost exactly opposite points, throws a lobe of jagged headland far out into the sea. On the western spur, high above the village of Monolithos, a Crusader castle sits crumbling atop a soaring cliff; in the east, the promontory that bears the ruins of the acropolis of Lindos rises above a collection of whitewashed houses.
The island’s popularity, both today and in millennia past, can be largely attributed to its benign climate. Indeed, the Greek myths specify Rhodes as the personal fiefdom of Helios, the sun god.
One legend has it that Helios was away from Mount Olympus on his daily journey across the heavens when Zeus parceled out the earth to the other gods. He returned to discover that his share had been forgotten. Zeus offered to start all over again, but Helios spotted a budding island beneath the waves and asked that it be granted to him. After the gods raised the island above the sea (an event modern geology attributes to volcanic action), Helios set up housekeeping with the nymph Rhodos, which may explain the origin of the island’s name.
One of the pleasures of an island the size of Rhodes—barely 50 miles long and half as wide—is discovering it slowly, letting your imagination plant its explorers flags at a leisurely pace. I lingered over the breakfast that Marianne had served—warm bread from the bakery next door, ripe olives from the island’s foothills, oranges from the town of Malona near the east coast—then pushed my chair away from the table. It was a Greek morning. The sun was already at full power, burnishing the cloudless sky to cerulean brilliance.
I drove down the western coast, past gleaming white umbrellas and morning sunbathers. The sea flashed ribbons of cobalt, aquamarine, and turquoise, as if some child god had spilled powder paints into the water. Turning inland, I plunged into a long grove of shimmering olive trees, the undersides of their leaves gleaming silver in the sun. The road, lined with wild carrot and golden thistle, wound slowly through cypress and pine-covered hills, past villages where morning glories exploded psychedelically over blue balconies.
At the village of Maritsa, a forlorn collection of whitewashed houses, I stopped and ordered coffee in a cafe. Some young men and boys stood talking in front of a tiny video rental shop, shuffling their feet idly in the dusty street. Tourists had not yet discovered Maritsa, it seemed, although the cafe’s menu, written on a chalkboard in misspelled English, seemed to express hope for more visitors than just myself and the German couple that sat nearby sipping Coca-Cola.
The road continued along the island’s mountainous spine and then turned back toward the coast, rejoining it just north of the ruins of the ancient city of Camirus. Of all the traces of antiquity on the island, Camirus seemed to me the most evocative of the past life of Rhodes. Extensive excavations here had revealed temples of Athena and Apollo, as well as houses and roads spread on a bluff blanketed with purple thyme.
In Greek mythology Camirus was a grandson of Helios and Rhodos, and the brother of Lindos and Ialysus. The three boys were the mythical founders of the island cities that bore their names. In 408 B.C., the cities formed a unified government based where the town of Rhodes is today. With Athens and Sparta battling for dominance of the eastern Mediterranean, Rhodes’s strategic position made the new nation a sought-after ally. The island managed to keep its autonomy, even holding off a massive siege by the kingdom of Macedonia. Eventually, though, the cities of Lindos, Ialysus, and Camirus began to decline, although the latter was not abandoned by its inhabitants until the early decades of the Christian era.
The fragile ruins—the columns of a Doric temple, the foundations and walls of numerous Greek houses, and a 2600 year-old cistern—were open, accessible. I was free to climb the remains. They had lasted centuries. But could they, I wondered, withstand the erosion of today’s constant visitation?
Marianne and I sat at a table in the courtyard behind the hotel, drinking lemonade and watching her daughter, Maria, play. Sotiris was out fixing a neighbor’s plumbing. The early evening sun dipped slowly toward the horizon and bathed the walls of the city in a pink glow.
Several years earlier Marianne had come to the island for a six-week vacation and had stayed in Sotiris’s hotel. She fell in love with Rhodes, but more important, she fell in love with Sotiris. When her vacation was over, Marianne flew back to Denmark and packed her belongings. Two days later she returned, this time for good.
“I miss Denmark,” she told me, “but when I go home to visit my parents, I get homesick for Rhodes. I guess I have more of a southern than a northern temperament.”
Marianne went upstairs to get Maria ready for bed, and I wandered out into the Old Town. Each of my days on Rhodes began and ended among these cobblestone streets, which soon took on a lulling, home-like familiarity.
The island’s extensive traces of ancient Greek civilization, its dramatic limestone cliffs, and the glint of the sun on the blue sea could sustain me for a while. But it was within the town walls that I found the real life of Rhodes: children playing under the stone arches, old men peering over backgammon boards in the grimy cafes, merchants calling to each other, “Ti kanis?”—”How are you?”—from the stoops of their shops.
This medieval city, fortified by the Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem, is without doubt the most well-preserved legacy of Rhodes’s long and complex history. During the Crusades, the knights were among the vanguard of the Christian soldiers fighting to expand Western influence in the Muslim Near East. When the Crusader forces in Palestine were decimated by Muslim armies at the end of the 13th century, the knights retreated to Cyprus, where they licked their wounds and searched for a new home.
Before long they had found it. With the connivance of a Genoese absentee landlord who held nominal title to some of the Dodecanese islands, the knights captured Rhodees in 1309 and made it their new headquarters. The native Greeks were used to having new rulers. Since A.D. 297, when the decline of Rhodes as a power was sealed by its formal absorption into the Roman Empire, the island had been plundered by Persians, Arabs, Turkish pirates, Venetians, and Helios knows who else.
Before the knights lost Rhodes to the Turks, in the 16th century, they did a lot of beautify the island. I walked up Ippodamou Street to the elegant Palace of the Grand Master, where the leaders of the knights had once lived. This stone fortress, badly damaged in 1856 when a nearby powder magazine blew up, was restored in the 1930s by the Italians, although more to the grandiose tastes of the island’s Fascist governor than with fidelity to historical accuracy.
From the palace I turned into the Street of the Knights, a long, narrow avenue paved with gray stones. This thoroughfare is lined with the perfectly preserved medieval inns that once housed the lower ranks of the order. Each of the eight national groups from which the knights had been recruited had its own building, and the potpourri of architectural details recall the Gothic styles of Western Europe.
I continued on to a seafood restaurant in Ippokratous Square, the liveliest crossroads of the Old Town, and took a seat by the balcony. In the center of the square, four iron snakes decorating a Turkish fountain spat water into a large stone reservoir lined with tiles, each painted with the same scene of yellow birds picking red flowers from a tall green tree.
I had no sooner ordered dinner and a glass of retsina when a bitter argument broke out among the waiters. They were shouting furiously at each other over the heads of the customers. My Greek was not up to deciphering what the fight was about, but it seemed clear that half of the staff was ready to quit on the spot and the other half would be glad to see them go. Even as the dispute swirled around us, plates and wine glasses continued to be set before the bemused clientele with professional attention. I was surprised to realize that the busboy who attended my table with such polite deference was the ringleader of one of the two warring factions.
After about half an hour the battle began to wane, and with subtle words and gestures good feeling was restored. I turned my attention back to Ippokratous Square. The spray from the Turkish fountain glittered like a shower of jewels in the last rays of the setting sun.
One day, Sotiris took me to see Konestandinos Kehiagias, whose life spanned another of the shifts in Rhodes’s turbulent history. He was a boy when the Italians captured the island from the Greeks.
In a house on a back street we found the old man lying on his bed. He was bald except for a small white patch, and his chin was covered with white stubble. He smiled at us, revealing a full set of bottom teeth but only two uppers. As Sotiris translated, Konestandino’s wife, Maria, sat on a chair nearby.
“I was born in 1904,” he said, waving a gnarled hand as if to dismiss the burden of all those years. “My family came from Archangelos, a town between here and Lindos. The Italians came in 1912. They pushed out the Turks. I was eight years old. I didn’t understand then, but we didn’t have any rights. The Italians were okay at first, but when Mussolini came to power, they closed all the Greek schools. We were forced to speak Italian. All the older generation still speak it. But I remember that even before that, in 1919, the papas, the head priest, came to all the villages and said that at Easter we should demonstrate and say we wanted to be part of Greece. And so we did. But the Italians sent soliders to Archangelos. They put us in the church, and then they took us out five at a time and beat us with their guns. I held onto my grandfather’s hand, but they beat all of us, young and old.”
As he told his story, he began to lapse into Italian, and Maria spoke for the first time. “Speak Greek!” she said sharply to her husband.
I asked if he remembered when Rhodes finally did become part of Greece.
“Of course,” Konestandinos said. “I cannot tell you the happiness we felt. For three days we marched from Archangelos to Rhodes and back, yelling zito! zito!—Long live Greece!”
A few mornings later I was talking with Sotiris in the hotel’s lobby when another guest, a young Englishwoman, came down the stairs. She was going to Lindos for the day, she said. “There are too many tourists in Rhodes town.”
As she went out the door, Sotiris rolled his eyes. “What does she think she is?” he said. “Wait until she gets to Lindos!”
“People ask me,” he said, “What is the best time to go there, when there aren’t any tourists? I say, ‘go at eight o’clock.’ Then someone else comes down and asks the same question. So I say, ‘go at seven o’clock.’ People don’t know what they want. One day someone asked me, ‘Where’s a beach where there are no people?’ So I sent him to Afandou, a nice long beach on the east coast of the island. He came back complaining because he couldn’t buy a Coke!”
I failed to heed Sotiris’s advice the day I visited Lindos, and showed up at ten o’clock in the morning. Even at that hour it was devilishly hot, and the approach to the town was already clogged with tour buses. It is no surprise that Lindos is such a popular spot. It offers the island’s most dramatic combination of scenery and history.
A towering promontory rises from the sea, flanked by the two harbors that once made the city a center for commerce and seafaring. A dense cluster of white-washed, 17th century houses straddles the base of its sheltered side, while the seaward aspect rises in sheer cliffs. The summit is dominated by a massive Crusader fortress, and protected within its stone walls is the ancient acropolis of Lindos, one of the most famed sites of Greek antiquity. It was excavated by Danish archaeologists in the early part of the 20th century, and later partly restored by the Italians.
I waited in line for 20 minutes to buy a ticket from a harried man in a wooden shack, and then joined hundreds of other visitors who were clambering over the extensive ruins of what had once been a sanctuary to the goddess of wisdom. Nearly half of the columns of a Doric portico are still standing, and four well-preserved white pillars from the Temple of Athena Lindia, built in the fourth century B.C., rise against the blue sky.
Rhodian legend says that among the temple’s treasures was a magnificent gold and silver cup molded on the breasts of Helen of Troy. According to one account of the Trojan Wars, Helen fled to Rhodes after the death of her husband, Menelaus, and died there, hanged by the island’s queen, whose husband had also been killed in the war.
I paid my respects to Athena, then retreated down the hill to wander among the hours, whose entryways of black and white mosaic and doors of intricately carved wood are evidence of the prosperity that Lindos knew even during the Turkish era. In a cave overlooking the sea, I ordered an ouzo, the powerful, anise-flavored Greek liqueur. I had never cared much for ouzo before; it is an acquired taste. But as the sun rose higher and flooded the crevices of the town with light, I slowly realized that I was acquiring it.
Most of the invaders who put ashore on Rhodes over the past 2000 years left the place intact. Despite long centuries of foreign rule, the Rhodians were able to reclaim the island as their own. Yet for the Jewish community of Rhodes, which had prospered here since Hellenistic times, the last invasion—the German occupation of the island after Italy’s surrender to the Allies in 1943—proved fatal. The Italian Fascists had already expelled or driven out more than half of the island’s Jews; on July 24, 1944, the Germans deported the 1700 who remained to Auschwitz. Only 161 survived, and of those, few returned to their homes under the sun.
One Saturday morning I wandered through the former Jewish quarter of the walled city. In the Square of the Jewish Martyrs, which once stood at the teeming center of the town’s economic activity, all was ghostly quiet, except for a burbling fountain made up of three large iron sea horses. I walked down a narrow street lined with crumbling stone buildings and found myself standing before the vine-covered entrance to a synagogue.
Inside, an old woman and a middle-aged couple were sitting on some wooden folding chairs, talking in Italian. As I walked past, the woman said something in Greek, which I took to mean, “Can I help you?” We tried two or three languages and finally settled on French. She was the caretaker of the synagogue, she told me. I asked if there would be any services.
“Not today,” she said. “There are only 35 Jews on Rhodes now. Perhaps later in the season, when more tourists are here.”
It turned out that the couple she was speaking to were Jews visiting from Italy. With a sudden but gentle motion, the man grasped the old woman’s wrist and turned the fleshy underside of her forearm towards me. I couldn’t help trying to read the faded number tattooed there. When they left, I stayed on to talk to the caretaker. She told me that her family had lived on Rhodes before the war, that all of them excerpt her had died in Auschwitz. She came back to Rhodes, alone, in 1949.
It was time for her to close up the synagogue. We stepped outside onto the worn cobblestoned street, bowed to each other, and I heard myself whisper “Shalom.”
“Shalom,” she answered, but her gaze was elsewhere.
My last afternoon on the island, I decided to revisit the acropolis of Rhodes, more for its sweeping views of the sea than for what remains of its past glory. This hill was the site of one of the ancient world’s greatest cultural centers. On my visit, it was home to a handful of white goats that grazed among the ruins of temples to Apollo, and Zeus and Athena. True, the Italians restored a small theater where Rhodian professors of rhetoric may have given their lessons, but only two or three of its stone seats are genuine; likewise, a large stadium nearby is fake, except for a few rows.
As I started back down the hill, I spotted a large mound of dirt next to an embankment. I hadn’t noticed it before, and I walked over to investigate. Three bare-chested men were working away with shovels, while a young man in a white shirt jotted notes on a clipboard. It was an archaeological dig, and the young man, Stathis Evangelinidis, was the archaeologist in charge.
About two months earlier, workmen laying the foundations for new public toilets had struck a stone wall. Further investigation showed that this was a corner of an ancient gymnasium, a magnificent building 200 yards long, and well known in antiquity. The Rhodians had often triumphed at the Olympic Games, and it was reasonable to assume that their athletes had trained here.
“Before now,” Stathis told me, “only a few fragments of the other end of the gymnasium had been discovered. So it’s a major find. But we have to hurry, because we’re digging under the road that goes over this enbankment. The street has been closed, and the tour buses can’t get by. Everyone is mad at us.”
Stathis said he would have about one more month to work. Then he would make his report, and cover everything back up.
“Cover it up?” I cried. “Don’t people realize this is important?”
“Stathis gave me a resigned smile. “Of course it’s important,” he said. “Of course it is.”
I stumbled down the hill to Mandraki Harbor, took a seat in a cafe, and ordered an ouzo. An early evening breeze was blowing across the water, and a sailboat was putting out to sea. The coast of Turkey was a dark sliver on the horizon. Perhaps it was just the ouzo, but after a while I started feeling better.
Soon I would go back to the hotel and change for dinner. Sotiris and Marianne had promised to take me to a restaurant hidden in a forest south of the Old Town, a wonderful place the tourists had yet to discover. But for the moment I was content to sit at the harbor’s edge, watching Helios drive his chariot behind the ancient hills.
Notes: This story is adapted from a piece I wrote for Islands magazine long ago. The S. Nikolis Hotel is still in business. I can’t find any trace of Stathis Evangelinidis. Perhaps he quit archaeology in frustration.
THANK YOU FOR THIS INFORMATION
Great writing! I have never managed to visit the Greek islands, so this vicarious experience was very welcome.