Letter from
Greece
Patrick Comerford
While Greeks got caught up in recent weeks in strikes and protests over the planned privatisation of the Ionian Bank and the sell-off of Olympic Airways, the government was more concerned with Cyprus and with its slide in the opinion polls.
But for the chattering classes, the most important topic of social conversation has been a new Greek dictionary which has committed the cardinal error of giving outsiders an insight into how Greeks speak about each other.
The primate of the Greek Orthodox Church, Archbishop Christdoulos of Athens and All Greece recently used a disparaging word – “Greekling” – to describe 53 deputies who would prefer not to take their parliamentary oath in the name of God. An unrepentant Archbishop Christdoulos insisted: “I will not keep my keep my mouth shut because I believe that what I have to say is what the people want and need to hear.”
The people would have been far happier not to have heard what Prof George Babiniotis had to say in his New Dictionary of Greek Language. Most Greeks were angered that Prof Babiniotis had provided a secondary definition of “Bulgarian”, revealing it is “a derogatory slang used in ball games by southerners to describe northerners”, particularly for supporters of teams from Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki. The dictionary also revealed that Pontians, Greeks originally from the Black Sea region, are often the butt of jokes.
But the outrage was not caused by sensitivity to Greece’s northern neighbours or Pontic immigrants who might be insulted by their names being used as insults implying racial inferiority. “Instead,” according to Nikos Konstandaras, columnist with the leading daily Kathimerini, “the fuss concerns the act of writing down, of codifying, something which everybody accepts readily.”
Every major team in Greece is pilloried by its opponents for its racial or social inferiority. AEK’s supporters are referred to as “Turks”, the supporters of Olympiakos as “cheap fish”, and those of Panathinaikos as “vaseline boys” – a term full of dubious sexual connotations.
Football transcends the social and class barriers in Greece. But, while these insults and nicknames are generally accepted and known, even in polite Greek society, Prof Babiniotis has broken a long-accepted taboo by committing these terms to the printed reference book where they can be read by outsiders.
The Culture Minister, Mr Evangelos Venizelos – who hails from Thessaloniki – said Prof Babiniotis had made “an error”, and Pasok’s candidate for mayor of the city, Mr Thrasyvoulos Lazaridis, a Greek of Pontic origin, made political capital of the controversy. A court in Thessaloniki banned the dictionary following an action by a former deputy mayor who is leader of Thessaloniki’s Pontic Greek association.
But Greeks have always spoken of one another in such terms since classical times. In the Dodecanese, the island of Leros suffers from the double indemnity of being host to the most notorious psychiatric institutions and the fact that its name has a close mental association with the Greek word for dirt or filth, lera. The ancient Greek poet, Phokylides, in one of his few epigrams surviving from the 6th century BC, wrote:
And this is by Phokylides.
The Lerians are evil.
Not one [evil], another not; but all, except Prokles;
and Prokles too is a Lerian.
There are less polite renderings of the original Lerioi kokkoi, but these are best left to imaginative readers to translate. The poet’s sentiments were echoed over 50 years ago by Lawrence Durrell when he visited the island and wrote: “God help those born here … The water is brackish – like the wit of its inhabitants. As far as I am concerned I am wholeheartedly on the side of the poet Phocylides who used the name of Leros to throw mud … An early example of literary mud-slinging!”
Durrell’s contemporary, the half-Irish Patrick Leigh Fermor, was privy to how Greeks talk about each other. Greece and Greek are not words in the Greek language – today they refer to themselves and their state as Hellenes and the Hellenic Democracy. But for 1,000 years Greeks knew themselves as Romaioi, the subjects of the Roman Emperor at Constantinople.
Under the Turks, all Greeks used the word romios to refer to themselves, and Leigh Fermor tried to contrast two appellations: he identified the Romios with the Dome of Saint Sophia, Demotic Greek, and home-sickness for the Byzantine Empire; the Hellene stood for the columns of the Parthenon, katharevousa, the formal Greek language, and nostalgia for the age of Pericles.
The poet Kostis Palamas liked to quote the dying words of a Greek hero before his throat was slit by Ali Pasha:
Romios ego gennithika,
Romios the na pethano.
“I was born a Greek, I shall die a Greek.”
Romiosini, the great epic poem by Yannis Ritsos celebrating Greek identity, has been set to music by Mikis Theodorakis. But when Leigh Fermor used Romios instead of Hellene in casual conversation to describe a Greek, he found Romios is strictly for internal use and not for foreigners, however fluent and seasoned. He “got a black look … I was an outsider usurping a secret family password.”
Prof Babiniotis, who has committed the sin of allowing outsiders to know about secret family passwords and about how Greek speaks about Greek, has offered to delete the controversial entries from the second edition, although he said the initial court order amounted to “a muzzle” on the academic community.
But Prof Babiniotis’ dictionary is likely to continue causing controversy. More indignant citizens are are now upset at a further entry: “Vlachs”, the name of a Balkan people ethnically and linguistically linked to Romanians is used in slang to describe a backward villager.
If Prof Babiniotis is to draw any comfort from the controversy, the first edition is almost sold out.
The Athens daily Ta Nea reported his book had sold 14,500 copies in less than a week – “a figure more suited to a racy novel rather than a reference book,” according to the Athens News.
This feature was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 30 June 1998.
COMERFORD WAY: Patrick Comerford’s online journal on Anglicanism, theology, spirituality, history, architecture, travel, poetry, beach walks ... and more
30 June 1998
13 June 1998
All that delirium of the brave
Patrick Comerford
One of the most moving events for me of the 1798 commemorations this summer was being asked to unveil a memorial stone on the mass grave in Old Ross of more than 100 people who were left without a gravestone or memorial for 200 years.
The 100 women, men and children buried in St Mary’s churchyard were burned to death in a barn at Scullabogue shortly after the United Irish rebels were defeated at New Ross. But for two centuries they were neglected, often branded as loyalist prisoners of war, and a source of embarrassment to many. This year, the victims of Scullabogue have been remembered with equal dignity along with those who died fighting with the United Irishmen.
But it would have been impossible to imagine a public tribute like that during previous commemorations. As Professor Kevin Whelan writes in one of the many new books published to coincide with the bicentenary, “The 1798 rebellion remains buried under an oppressive weight of misrepresentation … The Catholic Nationalist version which dominated the centenary, 1938 and 1948 commemorations created the 1798 which people think they know.”
Historians such as Whelan, Daire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong have done much in recent years to challenge the way in which the myths and ballads of the late 19th century have shaped and formed our ideas of what happened in 1798. Kevin Whelan’s comments come in a new book edited by Mary Cullen, 1798: 200 years of Resonance (Irish Reporter Publications, no price given). The generosity of spirit he encourages is reflected in the essays by Norman Porter and Martin Mansergh.
Porter tries to reclaim some of the values of 1798 for unionists, or, in his own words, “to capture and sustain the anti-sectarian legacy of 1798”. In our post-referendum days, his view of unionism offers hope not only to southern nationalists but a gripping challenge to Northern nationalists and unionists alike.
In an equally generous approach, Dr Mansergh pays tribute to Unionists such as Councillor Harvey Bicker, who chairs the Co Down 1798 Commemoration Committee, and rightly says: “Our task today, like that which the United Irishmen set themselves, is to transcend the conflicts of the past.”
And so it is sad to see the Rising being used for narrow, marginal political purposes and to read in the same collection Sean O Bradaigh’s essay which could have been written in 1948 or even in 1898. He displays no knowledge of recent historical studies which show that the founding and leading United Irishmen included not only Presbyterians and Catholics, but members of the Church of Ireland, too, and that the turning point for the Wexford Rising was the Battle of New Ross, not the defeat at Vinegar Hill.
Unfortunately, the worst of the myths and ballads are still being perpetuated and recycled with fervour and with glee. The best and the worst of those ballads have been put together by Danny Doyle and Terence Dolan in The Gold Sun of Irish Freedom: 1798 in Song and Story (Mercier Press, £6.99). The book comes complete with musical notation and simple guitar chords, and combines a linking narrative with the history, songs, poetry and fables of the Rising.
But while tales such as that of Biddy Dolan and the conman who collected money to finance Father Murphy’s escape are engaging, the narrative is racy and questionable, recycling many of the old myths. And, in parts, it is plainly and simply inaccurate: Henry Munroe was neither Scottish nor Presbyterian, but a member of the Church of Ireland from Co Down. Perhaps the authors’ sympathies are exposed when they say the French fleet at Bantry was defeated by “the Protestant Wind”.
The critical approach to understanding the events of 1798 was pioneered as long ago as 1955 by Dr Charles Dickson, with his The Wexford Rising in 1798. Using previously unpublished letters, documents and archive sources, he set the standard for his successors, and his work remained the definitive account of events in Co Wexford until Dr Daniel Gahan’s seminal The People’s Rising. Now Dickson’s account has been republished (Constable, £9.99 in UK). The book remains valuable for its methodology, its succinct biographies, and its critique of the early bibliography of the Rising.
Three recent studies of the rising in neighbouring Co Wicklow and in Co Kildare show how that critical approach has been developed. Two accounts of the Rising are provided by Mario Corrigan’s popular All That Delirium of the Brave – Kildare in 1798 (Kildare County Council, no price given), and Liam Chambers’ scholarly Rebellion in Kildare (Four Courts Press, £9.95). Corrigan’s book benefits from local photographs and takes a look at the 1898 commemorations, too. Chambers’ book is based on his MA thesis at Maynooth, and effectively points out that the Rising was not a sectarian rebellion forced on the peasantry by a draconian military government.
That view comes through too in the memoirs of one of the forgotten Protestant heroes of the Rising, Joseph Holt, edited by Peter O’Shaughnessy. Rebellion in Wicklow, General Joseph Holt’s Personal Account of 1798 (Four Courts Press, no price given) is the first full and accurate transcript of the Irish part of the memoirs of Michael Dwyer’s friend. The book benefits from the annotations and footnotes, and appendices provide a variety of opinions on Holt as well as his obituary from the Dublin and London Magazine
But perhaps one of the finest and most original books this year has been edited by Daire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong. The Women of 1798 (Four Courts Press, £9.95) has its gaps – there is no biography of Betsy Gray or of Lady Pamela FitzGerald – but that is a small quibble given how women have been neglected by most historians of the Rising and, as Anna Kinsella points out, by the ballad writers, too. Robert Dwyer Joyce’s The Boys of Wexford opens in praise of “the captain’s daughter” but she remains unnamed – it was a double indemnity to be both a Protestant and a woman when tales of the Rising were being rewritten for the 1898 commemorations.
In his essay, John Beatty examines seven contrasting accounts of the Rising by Protestant women in Co Wexford, and points out that it is difficult to classify loyalist women of the day in neat liberal or conservative categories. Nancy Curtin provides a much-needed study of Matilda Wolfe Tone, and Anna Kinsella tells the contrasting tales of Mad Madge Dickson of Castlebridge and Mary Doyle, the oft-neglected heroine of New Ross.
Many of the dead of 1798 will remain neglected if heroes and heroines are selectively chosen in way the Richard Roche has approached his book, Here’s to their Memory (National Graves Association, no price given), which tries to list the gravestones and burial places in Co Wexford of supporters of the United Irishmen. Apart from an unfortunate number of inaccuracies (John Henry Colclough, for example, was a Catholic, not a Protestant), Roche also appears to have paid little attention to Brian Cantwell’s monumental work, which has shown why many of the 1798 graves are misdated.
And if it had been published any later, this book would have found no place for the new memorial in Old Ross to the victims of Scullabogue. If the story of 1798 is to be told, then it must be told without a partisan approach, for the aim of the United Irishmen was to unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in the common name of Irishmen, not to perpetuate old separations and divisions.
Patrick Comerford is an Irish Times journalist; his study of the Church of Ireland clergy in Co Wexford in 1798 appears in Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter: The Clergy and 1798
This feature was published in The Irish Times on Saturday 13 June 1998
One of the most moving events for me of the 1798 commemorations this summer was being asked to unveil a memorial stone on the mass grave in Old Ross of more than 100 people who were left without a gravestone or memorial for 200 years.
The 100 women, men and children buried in St Mary’s churchyard were burned to death in a barn at Scullabogue shortly after the United Irish rebels were defeated at New Ross. But for two centuries they were neglected, often branded as loyalist prisoners of war, and a source of embarrassment to many. This year, the victims of Scullabogue have been remembered with equal dignity along with those who died fighting with the United Irishmen.
But it would have been impossible to imagine a public tribute like that during previous commemorations. As Professor Kevin Whelan writes in one of the many new books published to coincide with the bicentenary, “The 1798 rebellion remains buried under an oppressive weight of misrepresentation … The Catholic Nationalist version which dominated the centenary, 1938 and 1948 commemorations created the 1798 which people think they know.”
Historians such as Whelan, Daire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong have done much in recent years to challenge the way in which the myths and ballads of the late 19th century have shaped and formed our ideas of what happened in 1798. Kevin Whelan’s comments come in a new book edited by Mary Cullen, 1798: 200 years of Resonance (Irish Reporter Publications, no price given). The generosity of spirit he encourages is reflected in the essays by Norman Porter and Martin Mansergh.
Porter tries to reclaim some of the values of 1798 for unionists, or, in his own words, “to capture and sustain the anti-sectarian legacy of 1798”. In our post-referendum days, his view of unionism offers hope not only to southern nationalists but a gripping challenge to Northern nationalists and unionists alike.
In an equally generous approach, Dr Mansergh pays tribute to Unionists such as Councillor Harvey Bicker, who chairs the Co Down 1798 Commemoration Committee, and rightly says: “Our task today, like that which the United Irishmen set themselves, is to transcend the conflicts of the past.”
And so it is sad to see the Rising being used for narrow, marginal political purposes and to read in the same collection Sean O Bradaigh’s essay which could have been written in 1948 or even in 1898. He displays no knowledge of recent historical studies which show that the founding and leading United Irishmen included not only Presbyterians and Catholics, but members of the Church of Ireland, too, and that the turning point for the Wexford Rising was the Battle of New Ross, not the defeat at Vinegar Hill.
Unfortunately, the worst of the myths and ballads are still being perpetuated and recycled with fervour and with glee. The best and the worst of those ballads have been put together by Danny Doyle and Terence Dolan in The Gold Sun of Irish Freedom: 1798 in Song and Story (Mercier Press, £6.99). The book comes complete with musical notation and simple guitar chords, and combines a linking narrative with the history, songs, poetry and fables of the Rising.
But while tales such as that of Biddy Dolan and the conman who collected money to finance Father Murphy’s escape are engaging, the narrative is racy and questionable, recycling many of the old myths. And, in parts, it is plainly and simply inaccurate: Henry Munroe was neither Scottish nor Presbyterian, but a member of the Church of Ireland from Co Down. Perhaps the authors’ sympathies are exposed when they say the French fleet at Bantry was defeated by “the Protestant Wind”.
The critical approach to understanding the events of 1798 was pioneered as long ago as 1955 by Dr Charles Dickson, with his The Wexford Rising in 1798. Using previously unpublished letters, documents and archive sources, he set the standard for his successors, and his work remained the definitive account of events in Co Wexford until Dr Daniel Gahan’s seminal The People’s Rising. Now Dickson’s account has been republished (Constable, £9.99 in UK). The book remains valuable for its methodology, its succinct biographies, and its critique of the early bibliography of the Rising.
Three recent studies of the rising in neighbouring Co Wicklow and in Co Kildare show how that critical approach has been developed. Two accounts of the Rising are provided by Mario Corrigan’s popular All That Delirium of the Brave – Kildare in 1798 (Kildare County Council, no price given), and Liam Chambers’ scholarly Rebellion in Kildare (Four Courts Press, £9.95). Corrigan’s book benefits from local photographs and takes a look at the 1898 commemorations, too. Chambers’ book is based on his MA thesis at Maynooth, and effectively points out that the Rising was not a sectarian rebellion forced on the peasantry by a draconian military government.
That view comes through too in the memoirs of one of the forgotten Protestant heroes of the Rising, Joseph Holt, edited by Peter O’Shaughnessy. Rebellion in Wicklow, General Joseph Holt’s Personal Account of 1798 (Four Courts Press, no price given) is the first full and accurate transcript of the Irish part of the memoirs of Michael Dwyer’s friend. The book benefits from the annotations and footnotes, and appendices provide a variety of opinions on Holt as well as his obituary from the Dublin and London Magazine
But perhaps one of the finest and most original books this year has been edited by Daire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong. The Women of 1798 (Four Courts Press, £9.95) has its gaps – there is no biography of Betsy Gray or of Lady Pamela FitzGerald – but that is a small quibble given how women have been neglected by most historians of the Rising and, as Anna Kinsella points out, by the ballad writers, too. Robert Dwyer Joyce’s The Boys of Wexford opens in praise of “the captain’s daughter” but she remains unnamed – it was a double indemnity to be both a Protestant and a woman when tales of the Rising were being rewritten for the 1898 commemorations.
In his essay, John Beatty examines seven contrasting accounts of the Rising by Protestant women in Co Wexford, and points out that it is difficult to classify loyalist women of the day in neat liberal or conservative categories. Nancy Curtin provides a much-needed study of Matilda Wolfe Tone, and Anna Kinsella tells the contrasting tales of Mad Madge Dickson of Castlebridge and Mary Doyle, the oft-neglected heroine of New Ross.
Many of the dead of 1798 will remain neglected if heroes and heroines are selectively chosen in way the Richard Roche has approached his book, Here’s to their Memory (National Graves Association, no price given), which tries to list the gravestones and burial places in Co Wexford of supporters of the United Irishmen. Apart from an unfortunate number of inaccuracies (John Henry Colclough, for example, was a Catholic, not a Protestant), Roche also appears to have paid little attention to Brian Cantwell’s monumental work, which has shown why many of the 1798 graves are misdated.
And if it had been published any later, this book would have found no place for the new memorial in Old Ross to the victims of Scullabogue. If the story of 1798 is to be told, then it must be told without a partisan approach, for the aim of the United Irishmen was to unite Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in the common name of Irishmen, not to perpetuate old separations and divisions.
Patrick Comerford is an Irish Times journalist; his study of the Church of Ireland clergy in Co Wexford in 1798 appears in Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter: The Clergy and 1798
This feature was published in The Irish Times on Saturday 13 June 1998
Islanders remember waves of invaders
World View
Patrick Comerford
Kremasti and the small villages of Rhodes, with their tavernas, white-washed domed churches and neoclassical public buildings, appear for all the world like picture-postcard Greece. It is hard to imagine that Rhodes and its neighbouring islands in the Dodecanese have been part of the modern Greek state for only 50 years.
Looking across the narrow strait that separates the western coast of Rhodes from the thin, finger-like peninsulas that jut out from Anatolian Turkey, it is easy to understand why local people talk in terms of “when the Turks come,” and rarely “if …”
The shore line is pock-marked with gun positions which, despite their wilting camouflage, are always ready for use. Turkey and Greece have gone to war twice this century, and both states have yet to find a way to implement an agreement reached 10 years on reducing tensions in the Aegean.
The signs of invasions that came wave after wave are to be seen throughout the island. Rhodes has been attacked or conquered by each and every civilisation that has sought to impose its might on the Mediterranean, including the Minoans, the Dorians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Byzantines, Genoese pirates, and the Crusading Knights of Rhodes, who were forced by the Turks to abandon the island for Malta in 1522.
In the old town of Rhodes, the Turks have left a monumental legacy, with their terracotta pink mosques and minarets, Ottoman libraries and harems, fountains, baths and bazaars providing an oriental atmosphere in the narrow streets with their hanging balconies. There is still a small minority of 4,000 Muslims of Turkish origin on the island, and their integration into island life is typified by Mustafa, the taxi driver, who insists on being called Taki by his colleagues.
But while the Turks left their mark mainly in the old town, the Italians were the last invading force to leave their mark everywhere in Rhodes and throughout the Dodecanese. Despite their name, there are more than 12 islands in the Dodecanese: over 1,000 islands – only 26 are inhabited – fell to Italians after they defeated the Turks in 1912.
Under the command of the Italian Governor, Mario de Vecchi, Italian architects rebuilt the Palace of the Grand Masters, destroyed in an explosion in 1856, as a summer residence for King Victor Emmanuel III and Mussolini. They were given free rein to their fantasies and proved indiscriminate in their mixture of architectural styles, features and furnishings, plundering early Christian mosaics from Kos and misplacing them in the upper floors. The overall kitsch effect was later ridiculed by Lawrence Durrell as “a design for a Neapolitan ice”. Ironically, the rebuilding was completed in 1939, and neither the king nor Il Duce ever stayed in the palace.
A project that was a disaster – although on a lesser scale – was the building work at Kalithea, where Hippocrates had advised his patients to take the spa waters for kidney and arthritic complaints. The Italians tried to restore the thermal baths, laid out terraced tropical gardens, and built domed pavilions with pink marbled pillars, arcades and walks in pseudo-Moorish style. The project failed to attract Italian visitors, and today the site is only of passing interest to tourists on their way south to the popular resorts of Faliraki and Lindos.
Further north in the Dodecanese lies Leros, once famous as the island of Artemis, but now infamous as the home of Greece's most notorious psychiatric institutions, and as the island to which the colonels exiled their opponents. After Mussolini came to power, Italian architects and town planners started working on Mussolini’s vision of a fascist dream town in Lakki, building wide boulevards, a saucer-shaped market building with a clock tower, a cylindrical town hall and fascist centre, and the vast art deco Albergo Romana, later the Leros Palace Hotel, with a cinema and theatre complex.
To defy the Italians, the people of Leros abandoned Lakki and made the village of Platanos their own capital. Today, Mussolini’s summer residence houses the State Therapeutical Hospital, and Lakki is a ghost town by day, resembling a disused film set.
***
BUT, despite Durrell's criticisms of the rebuilding of the old town of Rhodes, the pleasant shape of the new town is a credit to Italian architects. They built the Nea Agora (new market) in the style of an oriental bazaar a Moorish inner courtyard and heptagonal domed fish market; they built the imposing and stately Post Office and the Bank of Greece; and they rebuilt the Evangelismos Church, a faithful reconstruction of the Crusaders’ Church of St John. The Governor's Palace - now home to the Greek Orthodox archbishop - mixes elements of Arab, neo-Gothic and Venetian styles, and has been compared by some with Doge’s Palace in Venice.
To view the authentic architectural styles of the islands, one must travel to Symi – squashed between Rhodes and the Marmares peninsula of Turkey – with its pastel-coloured neo-classical houses rising in tiers above the the semi-circle of the harbour they embrace. On the harbour-front at Symi, a small plaque commemorates the surrender of the Germans on May 8th, 1945, and the end of the second World War.
Durrell arrived soon after in Rhodes to edit to re-establish local newspapers and as part of the British administration. The British continued to administer the Dodecanese and in the old Governor’s Palace in the new town, the Italians formally handed over the Dodecanese in 1947.
This year, Rhodes and the other islands have been marking the 50th anniversary of their incorporation into the Greek state on March 7th, 1948. If Mussolini and Victor Emmanuel never managed to take up residence in the Grand Masters’ Palace, the Italians’ lasting legacy may well be the introduction of tourism to Rhodes. Close to the Villa Kleoboulos, where Durrell once made his home, they built the now-abandoned Hotel des Roses in Moorish style as the island’s first holiday hotel. And while other Greek islands have suffered from depopulation over recent decades, tourism has allowed Rhodes to see its population almost double from 66,000 in 1971 to the present 110,000.
The Italians are welcome and popular tourists today. No longer a threat, they are praised for the efforts to enhance the island’s beauty. But the islanders still look across the straits to Anatolia, and worry about the Turks who first and invaded and conquered them in 1522.
This ‘World View’ column was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 13 June 1998
Patrick Comerford
Kremasti and the small villages of Rhodes, with their tavernas, white-washed domed churches and neoclassical public buildings, appear for all the world like picture-postcard Greece. It is hard to imagine that Rhodes and its neighbouring islands in the Dodecanese have been part of the modern Greek state for only 50 years.
Looking across the narrow strait that separates the western coast of Rhodes from the thin, finger-like peninsulas that jut out from Anatolian Turkey, it is easy to understand why local people talk in terms of “when the Turks come,” and rarely “if …”
The shore line is pock-marked with gun positions which, despite their wilting camouflage, are always ready for use. Turkey and Greece have gone to war twice this century, and both states have yet to find a way to implement an agreement reached 10 years on reducing tensions in the Aegean.
The signs of invasions that came wave after wave are to be seen throughout the island. Rhodes has been attacked or conquered by each and every civilisation that has sought to impose its might on the Mediterranean, including the Minoans, the Dorians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Byzantines, Genoese pirates, and the Crusading Knights of Rhodes, who were forced by the Turks to abandon the island for Malta in 1522.
In the old town of Rhodes, the Turks have left a monumental legacy, with their terracotta pink mosques and minarets, Ottoman libraries and harems, fountains, baths and bazaars providing an oriental atmosphere in the narrow streets with their hanging balconies. There is still a small minority of 4,000 Muslims of Turkish origin on the island, and their integration into island life is typified by Mustafa, the taxi driver, who insists on being called Taki by his colleagues.
But while the Turks left their mark mainly in the old town, the Italians were the last invading force to leave their mark everywhere in Rhodes and throughout the Dodecanese. Despite their name, there are more than 12 islands in the Dodecanese: over 1,000 islands – only 26 are inhabited – fell to Italians after they defeated the Turks in 1912.
Under the command of the Italian Governor, Mario de Vecchi, Italian architects rebuilt the Palace of the Grand Masters, destroyed in an explosion in 1856, as a summer residence for King Victor Emmanuel III and Mussolini. They were given free rein to their fantasies and proved indiscriminate in their mixture of architectural styles, features and furnishings, plundering early Christian mosaics from Kos and misplacing them in the upper floors. The overall kitsch effect was later ridiculed by Lawrence Durrell as “a design for a Neapolitan ice”. Ironically, the rebuilding was completed in 1939, and neither the king nor Il Duce ever stayed in the palace.
A project that was a disaster – although on a lesser scale – was the building work at Kalithea, where Hippocrates had advised his patients to take the spa waters for kidney and arthritic complaints. The Italians tried to restore the thermal baths, laid out terraced tropical gardens, and built domed pavilions with pink marbled pillars, arcades and walks in pseudo-Moorish style. The project failed to attract Italian visitors, and today the site is only of passing interest to tourists on their way south to the popular resorts of Faliraki and Lindos.
Further north in the Dodecanese lies Leros, once famous as the island of Artemis, but now infamous as the home of Greece's most notorious psychiatric institutions, and as the island to which the colonels exiled their opponents. After Mussolini came to power, Italian architects and town planners started working on Mussolini’s vision of a fascist dream town in Lakki, building wide boulevards, a saucer-shaped market building with a clock tower, a cylindrical town hall and fascist centre, and the vast art deco Albergo Romana, later the Leros Palace Hotel, with a cinema and theatre complex.
To defy the Italians, the people of Leros abandoned Lakki and made the village of Platanos their own capital. Today, Mussolini’s summer residence houses the State Therapeutical Hospital, and Lakki is a ghost town by day, resembling a disused film set.
***
BUT, despite Durrell's criticisms of the rebuilding of the old town of Rhodes, the pleasant shape of the new town is a credit to Italian architects. They built the Nea Agora (new market) in the style of an oriental bazaar a Moorish inner courtyard and heptagonal domed fish market; they built the imposing and stately Post Office and the Bank of Greece; and they rebuilt the Evangelismos Church, a faithful reconstruction of the Crusaders’ Church of St John. The Governor's Palace - now home to the Greek Orthodox archbishop - mixes elements of Arab, neo-Gothic and Venetian styles, and has been compared by some with Doge’s Palace in Venice.
To view the authentic architectural styles of the islands, one must travel to Symi – squashed between Rhodes and the Marmares peninsula of Turkey – with its pastel-coloured neo-classical houses rising in tiers above the the semi-circle of the harbour they embrace. On the harbour-front at Symi, a small plaque commemorates the surrender of the Germans on May 8th, 1945, and the end of the second World War.
Durrell arrived soon after in Rhodes to edit to re-establish local newspapers and as part of the British administration. The British continued to administer the Dodecanese and in the old Governor’s Palace in the new town, the Italians formally handed over the Dodecanese in 1947.
This year, Rhodes and the other islands have been marking the 50th anniversary of their incorporation into the Greek state on March 7th, 1948. If Mussolini and Victor Emmanuel never managed to take up residence in the Grand Masters’ Palace, the Italians’ lasting legacy may well be the introduction of tourism to Rhodes. Close to the Villa Kleoboulos, where Durrell once made his home, they built the now-abandoned Hotel des Roses in Moorish style as the island’s first holiday hotel. And while other Greek islands have suffered from depopulation over recent decades, tourism has allowed Rhodes to see its population almost double from 66,000 in 1971 to the present 110,000.
The Italians are welcome and popular tourists today. No longer a threat, they are praised for the efforts to enhance the island’s beauty. But the islanders still look across the straits to Anatolia, and worry about the Turks who first and invaded and conquered them in 1522.
This ‘World View’ column was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 13 June 1998
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