Patrick Comerford
As winter gets colder, as the rain becomes more frequent, as the days shorten, and as holidays become dim memories, I take some comfort as the evenings close in looking back on old films and live=streaming music.
Some people can easily identify their ‘comfort foods’ – not necessarily nourishing or nutritious, but offering comfort to both the body and the soul. I sometimes turn to ‘comfort films’ and ‘comfort music’ – not always challenging, though sometimes they can be disturbing, yet certainly offering comfort to the eyes and ears, to the body and the soul in depth of winter.
We stayed up late last Friday night, marking Hallowe’en by watching Don’t Look Now (1973). It was an appropriate choice for BBC2 that night, but instead of being scared or disturbed, we ended up picking out places we know and appreciate in Venice: Salute, Saint Mark’s Square, the Hotel Gabrielli on Riva degli Schiavoni, Arsenale, a corner of the Palazzo Ducale, the Church of San Nicolo dei Mendicoli, where John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) is working, the Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the canals, bridges and narrow alleys, and, at the end, the Church of San Stae.
In the days that followed, I found myself was looking back on memories of some other ‘comfort films’ … Ill Met by Moonlight(1957), Never on Sunday (1960), Zorba the Greek (1964), Z (1969), Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Escape to Athena (1979), Ulysses’ Gaze or Το βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (1995), The Weeping Meadow or Το Λιβάδι που δακρύζει (2004) … I suppose if the list of ‘comfort films’ continued, it would tell a lot about my age, my musical tastes, and my love of Greece.
Escape to Athena may, perhaps, seem an odd choice for my list. The war film was directed by George P Cosmatos and stars Roger Moore, Telly Savalas, David Niven, Stefanie Powers, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Roundtree, Sonny Bono and Elliott Gould. The music was composed by Lalo Schifrin.
The film is set in a German-occupied Greek island during World War II. It was filmed on location in Rhodes, and tells of allied prisoners in a POW camp who are forced to excavate ancient artefacts.
The Greek resistance to the Nazis is led by Zeno (Telly Savalas), a former monk, and his small band of fighters. They use the local brothel, run by his girlfriend Elena (Claudia Cardinale), as an undercover headquarters.
Aristotelis ‘Telly’ Savalas or Αριστοτέλης Σαβάλας (1922-1994), who plays Zeno. was a Greek-American actor, better known as the bald Lieutenant Theo Kojak in the 1970s crime drama series Kojak. Claudia Cardinale (1938-2025), who plays Zeno’s girlfriend Eleana, is still regarded as one of the leading figures of Italian cinema, alongside Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida.
George Pan Cosmatos (1941-2005) was a Greek-Italian film director and screenwriter. He was born to a Greek family in Florence and grew up in Egypt and Cyprus. At 17, he became assistant director to Otto Preminger on Exodus (1960), based on Leon Uris’s novel about the birth of Israel.
The score in Escape to Athena is by the Argentine-American pianist, composer, arranger and conductor Lalo Schifrin (1932-2025), who died earlier this year (26 June 2025). His Jewish father, Luis Schifrin, led the second violin section of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic for three decades.
Schifrin’s best known compositions include the themes from Mission: Impossible (1966), Cool Hand Luke (1967), Bullitt (1968), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), and The Amityville Horror (1979) and he collaborated with Clint Eastwood from the 1960s to the 1980s in the Dirty Harry film series.
The final scene in Escape to Athena cuts to the present day – or, rather, the late 1970s. By then, Zeno’s former headquarters have been turned into a state museum housing the treasures of Mount Athena. As the film comes to its close, Zeno leads a tsamikos or syrtos dance with Eleana around a Seahorse Fountain in a town square.
It is interesting that Schifrin decided not to compose his own dance for this closing scene but provided an instrumental arrangement of the Dodecanese traditional song Περα Στους Περα Καμπους (Pera stous pera kampous, ‘The Nun’s Dance’).
The setting of the Seahorse Fountain in a town square in Rhodes is also a reminder that this film is not a comic downplay of World War II and that the resistance to the Nazis involved resistance to their racism, antisemitism and the Holocaust.
This is the city square where the Nazis rounded up the Jews of Rhodes over 80 years ago in 1944. In the post-war years, it was renamed the Square of the Hebrew (or Jewish) Martyrs (Πλατεία Εβραίων Μαρτύρων, Plateia Martyron Evreon) and the Seahorse Fountain was erected in memory of the Jews of Rhodes who died in the Holocaust.
As I watch the closing scenes, I am reminded of the Kahal Shalom Synagogue, the last surviving, functioning synagogue on Rhodes, and the woman who gave me a tour of the synagogue one sunny afternoon 26 years ago, in June 1999.
From the Seahorse Fountain, the narrow street of Pindarou leads up into the alleyways of Dosiadou and Simiou. A pair of tall doors with two raised Stars of David open into a cobbled courtyard and the Kahal Shalom, the oldest surviving synagogue in Greece and the last remaining synagogue in the old Jewish quarter Rhodes.
The Kahal Shalom is the last in a city that once had six synagogues. The floor inside and the courtyards outside are decorated with the graceful black and white pebble mosaic patterns or kochlaki that are distinctive throughout the Dodecanese islands. A plaque in the courtyard bears the date Kislev 5338 in the Jewish calendar, showing Kahal Shalom (‘the Holy Congregation of Plentiful Peace’) dates back to the year 1577.
But more immediate history and its horrors are recalled on a plaque in the west-side courtyard: it lists the names of 100 families wiped out in the Holocaust.
As the Italians – who captured the Dodecanese from the Ottomans in 1912 – passed increasingly repressive measures in the 1930s, the Jews of Rhodes began to leave in large numbers. By the end of the 1930s, there were still 2,000 or more Jews on the island, struggling to maintain their cultural life. A boatload of 600 Jews from Bratislava and Prague fleeing the Nazis reached Rhodes in 1939. There they were fed and quartered by the local Jewish community, and provided with fresh water for their onward journey to Palestine.
But as the boat sailed out, it caught fire, and the refugees were eventually washed up on the island of Samos. They returned to Rhodes, where the local Jews helped them to buy another old boat, and this time they made their way safely to Palestine. The refugees survived, but the Jews of Rhodes who helped them escape were to perish a few years later.
As the Germans took control of Rhodes, the leaders of the Jewish community decided to hide their Torah scrolls. In secret, the Torah scrolls were given to the Turkish religious leader, the Grand Mufti of Rhodes, Seyh Suleyman Kaslioglu, for safekeeping. He hid the Torah scrolls in the pulpit in the Morad Reis mosque. Several years later, he recalled, ‘One of the greatest moments of my life was when I was able to embrace the Torah, and carry it, and put it in the pulpit of the mosque – because we knew no German would ever think that the Torahs were preserved in the pulpit of the mosque.’
On 23 July 1944, 1,673 members of the Jewish community were rounded up in Rhodes and assembled in the square in front of the old Admiralty Building and the former palace of the Latin archbishops. From there, they were shipped to Piraeus and on by train to Auschwitz. The community that had survived the Crusades and the Inquisition and prospered under both Ottomans and Italians was decimated: only 151 people survived.
I visited Rhodes perhaps seven or eight times between 1996 and 2006, for work and on holidays. I often visited the Kahal Shalom synagogue or the Holy Congregation of Plentiful Peace, and still recall with fondness the welcome I received there from the late Lucia Modiano Soulam a Holocaust survivor who had been deported from Rhodes to Auschwitz and who died in 2010.
There have been Jews in Rhodes since at least the time of Herod the Great. After the Spanish Inquisition, an influx of Sephardic refugees from Spain and Portugal saw a growth in the Jewish population and a new input into Jewish culture in the Aegean. An 800-year-old Torah scroll in Buenos Aires has been dated and traced back to the Jewish community of Rhodes, probably brought there by Jewish refugees fleeing Spain and Portugal.
The Jews of Rhodes were doctors and merchants, printers and bankers, craftsmen and traders. The Ottoman Turks allowed them to live within the walls of the crusader city.
For over 200 years, 12 successive generations of the Israel family provided the Chief Rabbis of Rhodes. In the 19th century, four of the five banks on the island were in Jewish hands, and the first department store in Rhodes was owned by a Jewish family.
When the Jewish community in Rhodes was at its height in the 1920s, 4,000 or more Jews were living on the island. At the entrance to the synagogue, a stone monument lists the names of the Jewish families of Rhodes who were taken by the Nazis:
In memory of the 2,000 martyrs of the Jewish community of Rhodes and the brutal annihilation by the murderous Nazis in the concentration camps of Germany, 1944-1945. May they rest in peace.
The numbers are so overwhelming that instead of 2,000 names the plaque lists only family names. The Holocaust virtually destroyed one of the oldest Jewish communities in the east Mediterranean.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
Πέρα στους πέρα κάμπους
Πέρα στους πέρα κάμπους, πέρα στους πέρα κάμπους
πέρα στους πέρα κάμπους που είναι οι ελιές
Είν’ ένα μοναστήρι, είν’ ένα μοναστήρι
είν’ ένα μοναστήρι που παν οι κοπελιές
Πάω και γώ ο καημένος
για να λειτουργηθώ
Να κάνω το σταυρό μου
σαν κάθε χριστιανός
Βλέπω μια πάντα κι άλλη
βλέπω μια κοπελιά
Να κάνει το σταυρό της
και λάμπει η εκκλησιά
Ρωτώ, ξαναρωτώ τη
από πού ’σαι κοπελιά
Από εδώ κοντά ’μαι
κι από το μαχαλά
Μα έχω γέρον άντρα
και δυο μικρά παιδιά
κι ολημερίς με δέρνει
έχει σκληρή καρδιά
Βαρύ σταμνί μου δίνει
κι ένα κοντό σκοινί
Ν’ αργήσω να γυρίσω
για να ’βρει αφορμή
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