Rhodes dispatch

Although mildly berated for taking such an "unadventurous" holiday by a dear friend, the fact is that visiting this little tear-drop of an island 12 miles off the coast of southern Turkey has been on my bucket list for a long time. For two reasons: first to see the extraordinary fortifications sheltering the Old Town of Rhodes; second to see the famous Acropolis of Lindos, thirty miles down the coast from Rhodes town. They did not disappoint. In fact I would say if everything else on my bucket list delivers like this, my remaining years on this planet are going to be very happy indeed...


Rhodes has been civilised since the Stone Age, and has been subject to invasion and conquest almost as long. Occupied as long ago as 3000 BCE by the legendary (though very real) "Sea People", the island has been variously occupied by the Greeks, the Romans, a band of crusader knights called the Knights of St John, the Ottoman Turks, the Italians (we are now in 1912), until finally falling to the onslaught of millions of tourists from Britain, France, Germany and, latterly, Russia. I note the Chinese haven't discovered its wonders yet, though this surely can only be a matter of time.


There is evidence to be found of all these occupations, and it was our hugely enjoyable task, conducted under almost unbroken blue skies with temperatures hovering around 30 degrees C to seek out the imprints of all these diverse civilisations.


To this end we hired a car, a small one fortunately, as the roads are often narrow and invariably clogged with an armada of hire cars, to say nothing of the local traffic and pedestrians who seem remarkably casual about the prospect of being squished as they stray onto the streets. But we were able to find some wonderful things during our five day sojourn: These included the 4 kilometres of twenty metre high walls surrounding the old town of Rhodes. Built by the knights of St John when they moved there at the end of the 13th century having been ejected from the Holy Land, they were still not mighty enough to resist the siege of Suleiman the Magnificent who attacked in the 16th century. Once again kicked out of the place they made home, they persuaded the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to let them set up house in Malta instead. But they left their mark in Rhodes, perhaps most notably in the famous "Street of the Knights" a kind of Belgravia for the wealthier knights to situate their sumptuous residences . Even today, with the thousands of tourists who wander up and down it every day it still retains some of its atmosphere.


As does the ancient site of Lindos down the coast, though here too swarms of tourists (including us of course) who scramble over the site in their thousands every day in high season. Here, atop a forbidding bluff of granite you can find the walls of an imposing crusader castle, a medieval chapel, both set among the remains of the famous  Grecian temple to Athena Lindia. originally constructed in the 4th century BC. The whole thing is being slowly and lovingly restored and one day will be a truly astounding place- though in fact it always was, and certainly is today. But let's hope they do a better job of the restoration than the Italians did in the early 20th century when they owned Rhodes. Their hearts were in the right place, but their methods and building materials were often crap. Today much of their restoration work is itself being restored in a hopefully more enlightened era.


On the whole, what can I say? An unforgettable little visit. Thank you Rhodes!