The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  At dusk, when the sun falters and starts to tumble down in ruins, the islands go black and seem to smoke all round the central cauldron of the harbour. Always you wonder if perhaps tonight, in the middle of the night, will come the premonitory rumble which means that the volcano is on the rampage once more.

  A glance at the little museum in Thera is worthwhile, for it contains good things recovered from various island digs – notably some interesting Minoan ware and some geometric vases.

  Only one or two foreign residents brave out the winter here, for it can be fierce, and, because of poor anchorages, the island is frequently cut off by heavy seas from the mainland. That means that, by the middle of October, when the cruise lines stop calling and the ferries close down, the whole place reverts to silence and grimness – is given over to ghosts once more. Santorin!

  The Southern Sporades

  *

  Rhodes

  To understand the modern town of Rhodes one needs to recall that one year before Crete was allowed to re-join the mother country in 1913, Rhodes and the whole group of so-called Twelve (Dodecanese) Islands (a misnomer, they are fourteen) were handed over to Italy; they were to remain an Italian dependency for thirty-six years. To the Duce, when he arrived on the scene with all his addle-pated notions about Italy’s supremacy in the Mediterranean, the island of roses was especially important because of its strategic position. It is, after all, the third largest Greek island in area after Crete and Euboea. Not only that. The Black-shirts, in the first burst of auto-intoxication, drunk on the new folklore, believed that they were in some sense the inheritors of all the martial traditions of the Ancient Order of the Knights of Jerusalem. This order had once reigned supreme here, withstanding the full weight of the Turks for more than two hundred years; and when at long last they were forced to yield and evacuate the island, the six hundred knights of the order had repulsed the attacks of an army numbering one hundred thousand for more than six months. This was a story of heroism and devotion which naturally appealed to the Fascists, who wanted to enshrine the exploits of the knights in some visible way. The Rhodes of that epoch, they decided, must be reconstructed as accurately as possible so that no one would forget such a heroic period in the island’s long history. The reconstruction was admirably done, with all the Italian’s pleasant taste for greenery and décor. Indeed, it is none the worse for looking like a film-set ready for the cameras.

  It is inevitable too that the Italians should be more interested in Roman than in Greek history. However, here the archaeologists have played fair; Lindos, Cameirus and Ialysos, the ancient cities, bear witness to their scrupulous honesty and thoughtfulness. And the huge nine-volume Clara Rodos, printed on the Government presses (which I directed for a blissful two years), also pays as much scholarly attention to the Greek as to the Roman past. (I had the pleasure of distributing this work – slightly larger than Evans’s Cretan work – to all the libraries in Europe and the United States.) Nonetheless, if we carp at the jazzing-up techniques of Evans in Knossos we could apply the same sort of criticism to Rhodes. Indeed it is amusing to think that if it had been Crete and not Rhodes which had been given to the Italians for thirty-six years, Crete would probably look not unlike this, with the Venetian bastions of the towns restored and the old Venetian quarters of Chanea and Heracleion completely made over …

  The Italians also wanted Rhodes to be a tourist playground – perhaps even more delightful than Capri. It was partly with this in mind that they produced a healthy budget, and the Fascist rulers of the island began their lavish restoration work. Inevitably the restoration is very much of its period, but the little town of Lindos is beautiful with its little toy fortress and its magnificent medieval walls. Moreover, it is an accurate reworking of the great original which still has so much left in place in the way of armorial bearings and escutcheons that its newly restored authenticity never seems in doubt; only the absence of ruins gives it its faintly fictitious appearance. There are courtyards and fountains and sunken gardens and galleries which are a great delight, full as they are of flowering shrubs and lemon trees. The bees hum and circle in the dense summer heat, the waves of perfume climb the stairs of the Grand Master’s Lodge, punctuating the steady surge of cicadas from the market gardens which occupy so much of the ancient moat. In the silence, a few quarter-tones from a café radio are suddenly cut off, as if someone has taken it by the throat. A boy goads sheep along the narrow Street of the Knights with a thin, bored whistle. The sheep’s hooves curdle the afternoon silence. It is time to be going down to the sea for a swim.

  Never was there such water. For two lucky years I was able, by virtue of my job with the occupying force, to swim at the Albergo Della Rosa beach and to inhabit a tiny studio buried in flowering hibiscus hard by – at the shrine of Murad Reis which still exists, though the old Mufti is dead and the cemetery terribly unkempt. (Ah, those beautiful Turkish tombstones – showing the same wild melancholy and poetry of the Eyoub one outside Constantinople!) Rhodes had been suffocated by the Germans. Such thorough mining and festooning with barbed wire I have never seen. (Of course they had months to do it in, and they were trapped.) Then once we had made them prisoner, we co-opted them to help us de-mine and de-fuse and unwind wire together with our own sappers. As we watched, the famous town came to life again daily. First the harbour was cleared by the Navy for food convoys, then a post office opened which put the islanders in touch with the outside world. Then transport re-started. Some of the demining was done by the sea – I remember beaches where the winter surges had been so severe that a whole field of Teller mines had surfaced, like teeth in a gum, to show their ugly white steel faces. In some cases the little fisher-boys learned to defuse them and would crawl over minefields at risk of life and limb to rescue some of the explosive for fishing expeditions. Once, on a picnic with a rather tipsy staff officer who professed to know all the minefields, we suddenly found we were in the middle of one near Mount Phileremo which gave no signs of having been cleared. The officer had got his facts wrong; we had been drinking white wine and eating bully beef in an uncleared area. How to get back to the road was the problem – which we solved with the most ludicrous and comical precautions, swearing at our friend all the time for having lured us into such a dangerous place.

  Of all the 1900-odd Greek islands, I feel I know Corfu, Rhodes and Cyprus best, simply because I have had the luck to reside in them for a couple of years. I have also camped in them at every season and covered much of the ground on foot. Of the three, Rhodes is the most compact and manageable for the visitor, though not the most lovely. Corfu and Cyprus are each more beautiful in their own way. It would take a lifetime to reside in all the islands for any time – and even the number 1900 does not take account of the mere atolls, quite uninhabitable, of which there are so many. Rhodes is specially interesting to me because I first arrived in it just after a fierce though short siege, which enabled me to visualize how the place must have been just after the greater sieges by Suleiman and, earlier still, that great siege-master Demetrius Polyorcetes. The British made one attempt to seize the island but the Germans showed their teeth and threw us into the sea. It was therefore decided to let them starve until they submitted. In the interval an attempt by the Italian forces to make their allies surrender led to a battle which was followed by a wanton massacre of their troops around the defensive positions of Phileremo. Then starvation set in, which was unfortunately shared equally by civilians and soldiers. We arrived in time to save most of the civilian population, but not before most of the livestock, both domestic and personal, on the island had been devoured by the Germans. It was strange to see pets tied to the front door knob, lest they escape and be picked up by the troops which scavenged everywhere; cats, dogs, hamsters – anything they could find went into the cooking pot. But the Germans were obstinate and were losing some three hundred malnutrition cases a day when at last they caved in.

  So Rhodes awoke once more like the Sleeping Beauty, though it t
ook more than a single hairy kiss from the incoming army administration to wake her. The confusion was unimaginable. Many of the Italian civilians wished to return to Italy, as did the four or five hundred Siena farming families who had been co-opted to settle and farm the central parts of the island. It was thanks to them and to the high tourist budget that the island had been so beautifully re-afforested – though of course the work of modern forestry experts had produced something quite unlike the forests of ancient Greece. Pines and eucalpytus were as much in use as they are in Sicily – and the work had been very thoroughly done. Rhodes is naturally fertile, but the Italians succeeded in increasing water and greenery and for this they must be much commended. That there is a slight feeling of theatrical deadness about their Rhodes reconstruction does not diminish its interest for those who would like to refashion in their minds the sort of backdrop against which the Crusades were launched. The museum is a model of its kind, and the envy of curators on other islands. I spent some time trying to persuade the Greek authorities that these august precincts might make an admirable small university, which would attract pupils from all over the Middle East. But local visions did not stretch further than a casino, which does not yet exist. The quiet streets of this romantic quarter are a pleasure to saunter among; while hard by is a huge tree under which kindly Turks have made a café where you can still hear the bubble of rose-water in a narguileh, or smell the sweet-leather smell of Lakadif tobacco smoked in churchwarden-type clay pipes – which are becoming rarer today.

  It is curious the number of names under which the island went in ancient times – each seeming to represent a facet of its protean character. Rhodes is shaped like a maple-leaf or an obsidian arrow-head, whence the name Stadia to denote its ellipsoid form; Mount Atabyros, the chief mountain, supplies another name; while Olyessa denotes that the island was always earthquake-plagued. Poeissa, referring to its richness, is more justifiable; Makaria, the Blessed Isle, is all right too, and Asteria which describes its star-clear atmosphere. The only odd name is Snake Isle, apparently suggesting that it is the home of snakes. I saw no sign of these creatures although they proliferate in most other islands. If there are snakes around, they tend to emerge during the first sunny days; the tarmac warms up and they come out to sunbathe and warm their stomachs. Snakes are voluptuaries, just like cats, and often fall asleep, sun-drugged; and as they are also deaf, one often runs over them in a car. In a rich island like Corfu – at the southern tip near Lefkimi – they slide across the road all the time, in Crete as well. But in Rhodes I was not struck by the number of snakes. Probably most of them are not strictly speaking poisonous, though I suppose the adder and the horned viper must exist in the marshes here as they do in metropolitan Greece.

  The ancient history of Rhodes is compact and shapely. Originally there were three capitals, Lindos, Cameirus and Ialysos. The accent was on trade and sea-power, just as in Crete, and the Rhodian sailor was as famous as his Cretan neighbour for his skills. Some of the old battles are interesting to read about in the pages of Torr’s history, but the sieges are the most fun and would make a book in themselves, full of details about extraordinary mechanical weapons. Demetrius, with his crazy elephantine towers and other kinds of ballista, makes wonderful reading – especially as one can follow the engagements as if one were reading a staff map, thanks to the reconstructed fortress which is unintentionally also a good guide to the ancient quarters of the town. The early history is made up of the usual intricate collection of tribal invasion stories. However, most unusually, the three major cities decided to pool their resources and found the city of Rhodes, on its present site. This was in 408 BC. What is striking is that the new city had no good harbour; that of Lindos was infinitely superior, and indeed Lindos lived on in splendour for a long time because of it. Nevertheless Rhodes, on its bull-necked spit of land, was fixed as the new capital. Gossip has it that the town was planned by Hippodamnus, who also laid out Alexandria when it became a rich entrepôt for trade. This gossip of course has been contested on several grounds, most of them well founded; it was perhaps a piece of local snobbery to pretend that the man who laid out both Piraeus and Alexandria was also responsible for the layout of the ancient town of Rhodes. The absence of a harbour was a problem, which was dealt with in a surprisingly amicable way by the three investors in the maritime future of Rhodes. (And how well it turned out for them!) Apparently they equipped the town with no less than five harbours, all to some extent artificial. Three were of handsome proportions and made use of the indentations on the east cape; hard by these was an elaborate complex of bays for dry-docking – in fact, a well-found naval yard. When the whole operation was at last finished and the result put into action, the astonished world woke up to the fact that Rhodes now had the best equipped port in the Aegean. Prosperity was not slow to follow, though the elegant natural harbour of Lindos did not die immediately. The magnificence of the exploit inspired Timosthenes to write his treatise On Harbours, a sort of Mediterranean Pilot of its day.

  In 1936 the Italians published a detailed plan of the city, recording thirty-four classical and Hellenistic finds within the area demarcated by the medieval walls. But the westward suburbs, rising very steeply to the Acropolis (now Monte Smith), give much clearer evidence of the street grid and the dimensions of the buildings of antiquity. Already, between 1916 and 1929 – long before the craze to restore the Crusader castle – extensive Italian digs had revealed the foundations of temples to Zeus and Athena Polias, a stadium, a small theatre, a gymnasium and a temple to Apollo. The whole of this site dates from the second century BC. It is an easy stroll from any of the hotels, and you can lie in a rock tomb eating cherries and watch the night fall over the straits – for Turkey is only eighteen kilometres away from this eastern spur of Rhodes. The theatre is now completely restored and has a summer classical programme of plays and recitations – a delight in those crisp, crystalline nights with the sky full as a hive of twinkling and shooting stars. Aerial photography, developed during the war, has clearly revealed the chief parts of the ancient city’s ground plan. Whoever executed it was a master architect. The famed rectilinear plan with its uniform houses and thoroughfares retained its decorative force from nearly every visible angle and, together with the three thousand statues for which the city was famous, made it rank beside Athens itself and Syracuse in spaciousness, dignity and aesthetic beauty. When one tries to visualize such splendour and catches a whiff of the blazing whiteness of marble or salt or whitewash which somehow seems to symbolize the Greek thing, one cannot help feeling that the world which followed – Venice, Genoa, Turkey – exemplified something meaner and crueller … History running down like a tired clock, beauty being bartered against gain.

  With the birth of Rhodes city and its harbours, the island was able to afford itself the best fleet of the age, and its rise to power in economic terms was extraordinarily swift and complete. Moreover, they were diplomats, the Rhodians, as well as tough sailors, and they managed to play the surrounding states off against each other and thus keep their freedom. They were also far-seeing enough to recognize the powers of young Alexander the Great and to throw in their lot with him; they helped his forces destroy Tyre and then, as the conquests of Alexander swiftly succeeded one another, it fell to the lot of Rhodes to dominate rich markets – Cyprus, Cilicia, Syria and Egypt. Taking full advantage of this, Rhodes became the richest and most peaceful of all the Aegean islands of that time. It appears that Alexander himself was so great an admirer of Rhodian institutions that he was later to try to introduce them into Alexandria around 331 BC. He even had the little island opposite the harbour christened Antirhodos.

  But the situation was not to last. Even though Rhodes had been masterful at trimming its sails according to the prevailing winds, it found with the death of Alexander that the whole pattern of things in the Middle East had begun to fall apart. Within a decade dissident generals began to emerge as the kings of warring states. There was nobody sufficiently strong
to back. Which way should they turn? Ptolemy’s Greek kingdom was in Egypt, Seleucus’s in Asia, Cassander’s in Macedon; Lysimachus held Thrace … and so on. Antigonus was the only ruler with the will and the sea-power to try to restore the unity of the Empire, and his efforts went as far as the creation of a new league for the Aegean Islands. Rhodes stayed clear and independent still – happily so, for Antigonus was smashed at the Battle of Ypsos in 301 BC. But the island was not forgiven for her supercilious attitude, especially because, before being smashed, Antigonus had nursed schemes for an attack on Ptolemy and had asked Rhodes for an alliance – which the island refused on the grounds that Egypt was their main trading partner. Thus, when the son of Antigonus, Demetrius, set out upon his military career in the vain hope of imitating Alexander, he decided to teach the Rhodians a sharp lesson, and assembled a large force with which to do so. The gloomy Rhodians found that they had to face some forty thousand men excluding cavalry and sailors and sappers. The armada which carried them was 170 ships strong and filled the straits, while 200 men-of-war convoyed them and guarded an innumerable flotilla of small craft carrying provisions of all kinds – plus the inevitable swarm of scavengers who smelled loot and booty.