Rhodes: It Goes To 11

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Ancient Wonders and Wondering Where They Went

The Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes is very impressive…or at least it was. In 1856, long after the Knights of Rhodes had shuffled off to Malta, a gunpowder explosion did by accident what the Turks could only accomplish by negotiation. The concrete, I am sorry to say, is not original. Most of what stands there today is a replica of a medieval castle as imagined by twentieth century Italian fascists. Fascists have no gift for subtlety and, oh , do they love concrete. The Parthenon in Athens suffered a similar fate when a Venetian cannonball bulls-eyed an Ottoman ammo dump (the Greeks blame the Turks for the destruction of the Parthenon, not the Venetians). The great mosaics on display in the Grand Master’s Palace aren’t from Rhodes anyway, they are mostly stolen from the Island of Kos. The Greeks blame the Italian Fascists for this, too, but Rhodes isn’t giving the mosaics back.
The Colossus of Rhodes was also very impressive…until it fell down in 226 BC. The pieces were sold for scrap and carted off on camelback when Istanbul was still Constantinople and there was still a city in Tunisia called Carthage (although Tunisia wasn‘t called Tunisia yet). The Greeks blame the Arabs for the missing statue and they blame the Turks for whole business with Constantinople. They could blame the Turks for finally polishing off Carthage, too, if they cared, but they don‘t. The painted plaster figurines of the mighty Colossus standing astride the old harbor don’t even qualify as knockoffs; they are replicas of an ancient Greek statue as imagined by seventeenth century Turkish merchants who got the idea from tenth century Greek merchants, who made it all up.
The Archeological Museum has an enormous collection of artifacts…somewhere. What’s on display is an incoherent jumble of assorted antique rubble labeled, if at all, with such informative explanations as “ancient Greek statue.” The museum staff don’t know what any of it is, they’re just there to make sure you don’t try to sneak a stone sarcophagus into your backpack. Many of the museum’s pieces are actually plaster copies with department store tags explaining where the originals went. If you want to see most of the finest artifacts of antiquity first hand, you have to go to London or Paris. The greatest treasures of ancient Mesopotamia survive in Manhattan. Isn’t history strange?
Greece has been demanding its stuff back ever since it crawled out from under the Ottoman Empire. In the past, the British Museum and the Louvre have chortled and said “No…sorry. If you’d stop storing gunpowder in your monuments, you’d still have your monuments, wouldn’t you?” By the early twentieth century, however, Britain and France couldn’t be so snide to everyone all the time and they deployed a new tactic. They “deemed” them part of Western culture’s shared history. “So it really doesn’t matter exactly where they’re on display. Might as well stay in London, mightn’t they? “
There is something to this argument; just as the New York Metropolitan Museum figured, in the 1920’s, that the treasures of Babylon weren’t safe in Bagdad because it’s “somewhat prone to instability,” Her Majesty’s curators figured that the preservation of Greek history was too important to be left to Greeks. Now that the United Kingdom and Greece are part of one big happy European Union, the curators have fallen back on the best defense the EU has to offer: bald-faced bureaucratic stalling. “Oh, dear me, now where did I put those ‘ancient artifact repatriating’ forms? Must follow procedures, mustn’t we? Can‘t violate those protocols coming from Brussels, now can we?”
Once upon a time, Lord Elgin bribed some Ottoman officials to look the other way for eleven years while he filched anything he could pry loose from the Acropolis. The Greeks blame both the Brits and the Turks for this. Now that a major restoration of the Acropolis is substantially complete and Athens is about to open the brand new Acropolis Museum, they want their marbles back. So far, the British Museum has offered to “loan” them for a short time. It’s a safe bet that Greece has permanently lost its marbles.

Old Town

Having just told you that the most famous reasons to go to Rhodes are either fake or missing, I now want to tell you that Rhodes is a must for lots of other reasons. There are islands in the Mediterranean that I would score a ‘10’, but Rhodes goes to 11.
Old town Rhodes is a medieval city. Except for The Palace, the original medieval city is still quite intact. The island, stuck out in the Dodecanese, was just too remote for anyone to bother bombing during any of the wars of the modern world. Rhodes is also so culturally ambiguous that it was exempted from the great “exchange of minorities” (organized ethnic cleansing) between Turkey and Greece. While the island’s native Turks keep a low profile these days, they’re still there, lending a subtle and mysterious flavor to the place. You can‘t see it, but you can taste it.
Rhodes Town is now where the Greeks go to get away for the weekend. The Brits only pass through on their way to Faliraki. Faliraki is the British version of what you would get if you combined Panama City, Florida with Bourbon Street: a sort of Anglican Redneck Riviera. It’s the designated place for the English to go let their hair down. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever witnessed a group of London yuppies letting their hair down, but they tend to overcompensate. They also tend to improvise costumes for some reason. Try to imagine an absurdly inebriated investment banker from Gillingham dressed as Batman, “Oh, yanks, wot! Fancy getting the bevies in?” They get a week here executing a nonstop pub crawl that would make a Russian alcoholic consider the benefits of moderation and, as they leave, pass the baton to a new group. Apparently, back in the ‘80s, the great Faliraki pub crawl relay got so out of hand and the Greek authorities were so disinterested in dealing with the situation (“it can wait“) that the UK sent their own police officers to Faliraki to restore some semblance of order. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think this means England invaded Greece with cops to tell their own people to act a little more respectably while on holiday..
Faliraki is kept well away from Rhodes Town so that the Greeks can sip their Nescafe frappes in relative peace, which is to say over the pounding beat of noxious unlicensed knock-off US dance music from the ‘80s rather than the howling of cricketers drinking themselves into oblivion. When too many of Her Majesty’s subjects decided Rhodes Town was just lovely and began making it a destination, the Greeks counterattacked with the native savvy of a born mercantile nation, installing a permanent diversion. Mini-Faliraki is in New Rhodes Town, near the beach. Officially called Orfanidou Street, it is a piece of Faliraki broken off and transplanted so as to put a nice, thick medieval stone wall between the Greeks and the English. To tip off their countrymen that the place was intended for foreigners, the Greeks made sure the name of this street didn’t end in the letters ‘os.’
The British, Aussies, Kiwi’s and even the occasional Canadians are not the only foreigners to be interested in the Island of Rhodes, they‘re just the most fun to hang out with. There are plenty of Germans, other assorted Central Europeans, a sprinkling of stoic Scandinavians, a couple of capricious Czechs, some suspicious looking Slavs, and all sorts of shady breakaway republic-types plus people from the countries all these republics are trying to break away from. They stick to the beaches, for the most part, although you do see them occasionally treading on ancient ruins to pose for pictures of each other. About the only time you even notice the Germans is when you have to get through the curious little airport on Rhodes, where they form an obstacle course with their towering mounds of luggage.
The Rhodes airport is a proper subject for my next entry. While I’m on the subject of transportation again, I will have to tell you about the bus fare to Lissos and the Cab Stand Blood Feud. I will also have some pictures of the impressive Acropolis of Lissos and the climb up to it.

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Photos

Old Town
The town the crusaders built is still largely intact since the island is so remote nobody ever got around to bombing it.

The Outer Wall
The Palace may be a fake, but much of the city wall are genuine.

St. Cathrine's
A Byzantine church.

An Historic Marker
Marking, well...something.
Maybe the British Museum has a point.

The Park Outside the Symi Gate
Most of the park is occupied by vendors selling Greek sponges, etc.

The Park
There's a path around the old city walls. It looks like someone is planning to pave it, but "it can wait."