From the Elephant's Back (33 page)

To the traveller familiar with the Rhodes of pre-war years much will seem different;
[4]
yet the medieval town may still be considered one of the best-preserved monuments to the architecture of the Middle Ages extant in Europe. The walls have escaped save for one large breach. An extensive area of the Jewish quarter, however, has disappeared into a heap of rubble and plaster. Of the pre-war Jewish community, which numbered three thousand souls, only some thirty have managed to survive the rigors of the concentration camp and find their way back to the desolate Hebraica.
[5]
A few of the smaller treasures have disappeared, but in the main the Italians succeeded in storing the contents of their museums safely; and though seriously bombarded more than once, Rhodes suffered, as it were, little more than contemporary damage. Her Middle Ages remains with all its somber beauty. And it is for this, no less than for her landscape, that the traveller of the future will brave the sea-journey from Piraeus or Alexandria.
[6]

The history of Rhodes presents a picture so highly coloured and so packed with detail that it would be a daring thing to attempt to compress it within the confines of so short a study as this must be; yet the visitor is, so to speak, always within range of its beckonings. One cannot escape it. Each walk through the old town will throw up historical reminiscences so rich in their content that one is forced to halt, to speculate, to imagine. Hard by the ugly modern cinema bequeathed to the Rhodians by their last Governor,
[7]
the traces of a Hellenic wall will remind one that somewhere here Caesar and Pompey struggled under Rhodian rhetoricians for mastery over the art of speechmaking.
[8]
Here the exiled Tiberius,
[9]
in his short cloak, walked among the temples, happy to have been granted Rhodes as a place of exile. Strolling beside the mirror-calm waters of Mandraccio harbour, in which one can see the little fort of St. Nicholas reflected, who can help trying to imagine the Colossus of Rhodes which earned, by its prodigious size, a place in the catalogue of the Wonders? If, then, these notes are to be of service to the visitors of the future they should surely touch and illuminate those parts of Rhodian history which lie, so to speak, outside the covers of books, embodied in a building or a legend whose reference is contemporary and immediate. How much of the orthodox chronology does the traveller of today need to enjoy this lovely and mysterious island? Let us be bold.

Before Rhodes came into being, the power of the island was vested in three ancient cities—Lindos, Kameiros, and Ialysos (modern Phileremo). No one can claim to know Rhodes who has not visited them, for they are still there today; Lindos blazing upon its stony promontory, Kameiros tucked into the limestone hollows of the landscape like a letter into an envelope, and Phileremo stately and remote among its nursery pines. Each has its peculiar flavour, its peculiar evocations; though all are different, one cannot but describe them as evoking something common to the broad placid tone of the island as a whole. They are different features of the same lovely face.

From the Lindean acropolis, where once the goddess Athena accepted the flameless sacrifices of the ancients, one can stare down a sheer five hundred feet at the summer sea, motionless now and drowsy. It is like staring into the lens of a peacock's eye enormously magnified. Eastward lies the landlocked harbour with the little stone igloo which is today known as the tomb of the philosopher Cleobulus,
[10]
one of the Seven Wise Men of the ancient world. In the summer sunshine the whitewashed houses of the town and the steep walls of the acropolis blaze like a diamond.

Cross to the opposite side of the island and see Kameiros. Here the archaeologist's spade has exposed the dazzling slender columns and walls of the Hellenic town. It lies in the honey-gold afternoon light, listening to the melodious ringing of water in its own deep cisterns. The light has a peculiar density and weight, as if the blue sea had stained it with some of its own troubled dyes. The amphitheatre is littered with chipped inscriptions. One can make out the names of some of the city fathers: Solon, Aristides, Aristomachos.
[11]

Phileremo lies inland, behind the modern village of Trianda. Standing on its now desolate and empty acropolis, one can look out towards the sea across the delightful green countryside that Timocreon
[12]
knew as a child. From the inner terraces the ground slopes clear away to Maritza, where the gutted modern Italian aerodrome lies.
[13]
Phileremo is within walking distance of the modern town.

At some time before 408 BC disaster overtook the three ancient cities. A great earthquake tore them to pieces. It was then that the inhabitants decided to move eastward and found a joint town which would offer them safety against the hazards of nature. The flat-ended promontory may have suggested a building-site which would prove earthquake-proof. At all events Grecian Rhodes was built in 408. It was perhaps the earliest example of over-all town-planning, for it was designed by the famous Hippodamus
[14]
who was responsible for the harbour of ancient Piraeus. The city that he created was, by all accounts, staggering in its simplicity and beauty. So selective a judge as Strabo
[15]
himself preferred it even to Alexandria and Rome. Its length is given as eighty stades,
[16]
and its inhabitants numbered some two hundred thousand. The carefully grouped buildings and temples ran round the semicircle of the natural amphitheatre, leading down to the three harbours. At their back, on the little hillock today known as Monte Smith, stood a temple and acropolis encircled by a sacred wood. Pliny
[17]
states that the town was decorated by some three thousand lovely statues of which one hundred were colossi.

What remains today? Apart from the ancient stadium where the flocks of goats still idly browse, scarcely anything, to remind one of Rhodes' ancient splendour. On the crown of Monte Smith a few emplacements cut in the rock; towards Simbuli on the western side of the town, some shallow graves. In the centre of the old walled town one stumbles upon some broken drums belonging to an unknown temple. Hard by the Gate of St. Paul a few stone ramps remain to recall the famous Rhodian shipyards which turned out those marvellous triremes. Everything else has been swallowed in the slow succession of earthquakes which began some fifty years after the setting up of the great sun-god, the statue to Helios which we know as the Colossus. Today as one stands above the little theatre which is let into the walls of the stadium and looks down the softly inclining planes of orchard and meadow, it is the mediaeval town alone that one sees: the windmills softly turning against the sky, the great buttresses of the Crusader outworks—and the slender minatory fingers of the mosques which finally triumphed over it all. It is the Rhodes that Richard the Lionheart saw in 1191, when his fleet put into the harbour for a ten-day spell, en route for the shores of Cyprus.
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But what of the more recent history of Rhodes? For three hundred years the island endured the kindly but negligent rule of the Ottoman Turks. Yet it says something for the tenacious nationalism of the Greeks that they retained, and retain to this day, their distinction of tongue, creed, and costume. Throughout the centuries the vague and shifting shape of a possible Union remained with them—a Union which today has become fact and not fancy.
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Today there are some forty thousand Greeks on Rhodes and some six thousand Turks; though these figures will be altered when all the refugees have returned, the proportions will still be representative. Greek island culture remains predominant throughout the Dodecanese.
[20]

In 1912 the Italians annexed Rhodes, together with some fourteen other islands of the group,
[21]
and for a while the island remained merely a political counter for the Great Powers to bargain with. As late as 1923, however, an Italian governor of the island (more or less exiled there for his republican sympathies) saw its possibilities as a tourist resort, and started restorations side by side with modern developments. The island was encircled with some 150 kilometres of first-class motor-road which is today intact. Extensive reforestation was begun to check the soil-erosion which has destroyed the productivity of nearly every Aegean island. The ancient monuments were carefully and lovingly restored. Local production was increased by the development of state-subsidized farms. Though the local Greeks suffered from expropriation and petty despotism, the island itself became extremely rich and beautiful. A handsome modern town sprang up outside the mediaeval walled town; and these labours were crowned by the building of a great hotel which even today must rank among the best in Europe.

The name of the Governor responsible for much of this labour was Mario Lago.
[22]
His successor,
[23]
who replaced him in 1936, managed within a comparatively short time to ruin more than half of the town by tasteless and vulgar restoration, and to exhaust the flourishing revenues of the island. Yet despite the handiwork of this parvenu (who was a close personal friend of Mussolini) the island today retains enough of its natural loveliness to delight the eye and mind of the traveller in search of Mediterranean beauties; and more than its fair share of creature comforts to humour the exacting. Even the wartime invasion of the German and Italian armies—when the island became simply a cupboard for the hungry soldiery—did not completely ruin Rhodes. After a two-year interim spell of patient if often improvised work under the British Military Administration the Rhodians today feel confident that before long the normal life of the island will have recovered from the rigours and ravages of war. Much of the damage to buildings and monuments has been repaired. Deforestation has been halted. It remains to be seen whether the incoming Greek administration will be given the necessary budget to guarantee the upkeep of the island. The existing works and amenities of the town, however, make it the fourth or fifth town of Greece now that the Dodecanese are being incorporated into the Aegean group of islands.

A subject of frequent and admiring comment is the Rhodian character itself, which for gentleness, hospitality, and moderation is a model that might profitably be followed by the rest of the Balkans. The metropolitan Greeks themselves have been amazed at the absence of party strife on the political plane, and at the high degree of public order and civic responsibility apparent in the behaviour of the islanders. Cynics have been apt to suggest that Italian rule was harsh enough to break the natural Greek ebullience of the native character; while politicians point out that the long divorce from metropolitan affairs has made the Rhodian ill-informed about home issues. In justice to Rhodes it should be pointed out that moderation and poise was a remarked characteristic of the ancient Rhodians; while on behalf of the modern one might with justice quote the opinion of Newton, that garrulous English archaeologist and consul whose
Travels and Discoveries in the Levant
makes an ideal companion for the modern traveller.
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In 1865 he was able to write: “The Rhodian peasant does not fatigue his guest with cumbrous hospitality as the Greek bourgeois does; he does not poison him with raki, clog him with sweetmeats, cram him with pilaff and sicken him with
narguilehs
…I have generally found them thrifty, gentle and obliging in their intercourse with strangers and with one another, and far more truthful and honest than any Greeks I have ever had to deal with.”
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It would be impossible to contest the truth of that judgement even today.

To the scholar Rhodes offers a variety of instruction; for the Hellenist, Kameiros (Homer's “golden Kameiros”
[26]
), Lindos and Phileremo, for the student of Byzance the almost inaccessible churches of Funtocli and Alaerma, for the mediaevalist the incomparably rich material in Rhodes town, and in the frowning Crusader forts with which the long green coastline of Rhodes is studded—Pheraclea, dour Monolithos, Castello, and Villanova. The abundance of material precludes any general view of the island to all who cannot spare six months of study: for the different periods overlap each other closely, and the historical events seem at first inextricably entangled. The student of church architecture will be able to study the mosques which rise from the foundations of Byzantine churches, or to read of the Ottoman sieges from the illuminated Arabic texts in the Turkish library. A bowshot from where Demetrius of Macedonia
[27]
launched in 304 BC the attack which gained him the appellation Poliorcetes (“Besieger”)—the site was subsequently the Grand Master's
[28]
garden, and after that the cemetery of the Murad Reis mosque—he will be able, in the cool deep shade of the courtyard, to speculate on the fate of the exiled satiric poet Hascmet, who lies buried there: for Rhodes was also a place of exile for the Turks as it had once been for the Romans.
[29]

Much good paper and ink have been employed by the historians in describing the famous Colossus of Rhodes; the curious traveller who attempts to find his way through the subject by visiting the excellent archaeological library of Rhodes may well be forgiven if he comes away with rather a headache, for the subject has been one of violent controversy among specialists. Perhaps a brief summary of known facts, shorn of conjecture, would be of service to him. The Colossus was designed to commemorate the tremendous siege of antiquity when the Rhodians repulsed the forces of Demetrius Poliorcetes. It took twelve years to design and mount and it was finally thrown down by an earthquake which demolished Rhodes (c. 222 BC). The statue was about 105 feet in height. Its position is not known with any certainty, but the story that it “straddled the harbour” is a medieval concoction. No ancient authority makes this allegation. One of the most popular sites suggested is the present site of the tower of St. Nicholas fronting Mandraccio harbour. After its fall the great statue lay on the ground for some nine centuries. It was finally broken up by the Arabs in the seventh century AD and the metal carried off to Syria where it was put up to auction and knocked down to a Jew from Ur.
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The amount of the successful bid is unrecorded. It is recorded that several hundreds of camels were needed to load the scrap. Torr,
[31]
by far the best historian who has written about Rhodes, is inclined to the idea that the Colossus occupied a site somewhere within the Deigma, the oriental bazaar with which Hippodamus beautified the ancient town. The field of conjecture is, however, open to everyone who dares to venture into it.