Is Turkey voting this Christmas for a new Aegean conflict with Greece?

Ephesus, a major Greek classical site, is at the heart of a new Turkish tourism campaign for the Aegean (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

The phrase about ‘Turkeys voting for Christmas’ is often used to describe a situation when a choice is made that is clearly against one’s self-interest. The phrase is not easily explained outside these islands, because while turkeys are commonly associated with (non-vegetarian) Christmas dinners here, in the US they are associated with Thanksgiving, which falls on the fourth Thursday in November.

‘Turkeys voting for Christmas’ is an idiom with a very recent history. It seems the first time that phrase was used in 1977 by the Liberal politician David Penhaligon, when he said Liberal MPs voting the proposed ‘Lib-Lab’ pact between the Liberals and the Labour party was ‘like a turkey voting for Christmas.’

The phrase was used again in 1979 when the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan said Scottish Nationalists voting alongside Conservative MPs against the Labour government was ‘the first time in recorded history that turkeys have been known to vote for an early Christmas.’

Sunset in the Aegean at Kusadasi … a popular destination for Irish tourists (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

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The ‘Avian Flu’ epidemic has created a shortage of turkeys in many places this year. And since earlier this year there has been no Turkey at the United Nations either.

Turkey is now known officially as Türkiye at the UN, following a formal request from Ankara. Several international bodies are being asked to make the name change too as part of a rebranding campaign launched a year ago by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

‘Türkiye is the best representation and expression of the Turkish people’s culture, civilisation, and values,’ he said last December.

Although most Turks know their country as Türkiye, the anglicised form Turkey is widely used, even within Turkey. The Anglicised forms of the names of many countries are commonly used in the English language – think not only of Ireland, but also Germany, Spain and Greece. Indeed, Erdoğan has no problems about using the name Yunanistan for neighbouring Greece when he is speaking Turkish.

The Turkish state television channel TRT explained the reason for the image rebrand, saying Ergdogan was unhappy of the association of his country’s name with the Christmas, New Year or Thanksgiving bird. TRT also pointed out that the word is also used in some dictionaries as a synonym for ‘something that fails badly’ or ‘a stupid or silly person.’

Turkish and Greek flags fly side-by-side on a ferry between Samos and Kusadasi (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Tension rooted
in old wounds

For the past year, tension has been growing between Greece and Turkey, rooted in old wounds, stoked by insults and causing frayed nerves. Hardly a day has gone by this year without shots being fired between the two armies. On national news channels, military and diplomatic experts daily debate the risks of conflict.

A visit to Istanbul in March by the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis was expected to lead to attempts to bridge the gap between both sides. But Erdoğan is known for his outbursts, anger and insults. In recent months, his insults have been directed in particular at the Greek government and Mitsotakis.

At the G20 meeting in Bali last month, Erdoğan issued new threats to Greece, warning Greeks that the Turks may ‘overnight come suddenly.’ Speaking at a press conference, Erdoğan was defiant as he took the advantage of a unique international to repeat the threat that ‘one night we will come suddenly.’

He was repeating the words of an old Turkish song that says: ‘I can come suddenly one night.’ The same song was regularly broadcast on Turkish radio during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus almost half a century ago in 1974.

He said: ‘I insist on one night we will come suddenly. This statement is important to me. Greece must know its borders and the terms of the neighbourhood ... If they read the past, they will see what has happened. What I said is not a question of power, it is a question of the heart.’

At the same time, Erdoğan told a Turkish television station: ‘What I’ve been saying for ever, that we can come suddenly one night, this is a basic principle. To me, this is a phrase that cannot be taken back … So, we can suddenly get there again.’

But he has been saying the same throughout the year. On the eve of the European Summit in Prague in October, the Greek prime minister left the official dinner during a speech in which Erdoğan once again threatened Greece with the words of that old Turkish song, ‘I can come suddenly one night.’

‘For me, no one named Mitsotakis will exist any longer from now on,’ Erdoğan said at the end of May. ‘I will never accept [seeing] him again,’ he added, accusing the Greek Prime Minister of being ‘dishonest.’

‘Warehouse: Greek Shop’ … a Greek sign seen in the Bazaar in Kuşadasi, once known to Greeks as Neopolis (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

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Communications through normal diplomatic channels have all but broken down, and Turkish air patrols over Greek territory have never been so frequent as today.

Greek Ministry of Defence records show that between January and October this year there were 8,880 violations of Greek airspace by Turkish planes and drones, compared with 2,744 in 2021 and barely a few hundred in previous years.

A maritime and gas deal signed by Turkey and Libya earlier this year has been seen as an attempt by Turkey to expand its influence in the East Mediterranean. In response, the Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias called off the first leg of a visit to Libya, and refused to get off his plane in Tripoli.

Greece and Turkey are both NATO members, but they came close to armed conflict in 1996 and again in 2020. Periklis Zorzovilis of the Greek Institute for Security and Defence Analysis points out, ‘When so many fighter jets fly over such a small area, the possibility of an accident is very real.’

Windmills in the harbour in Rhodes … a narrow strait separates Rhodes from the thin peninsulas of Anatolian Turkey (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Aegean tensions on
identity and tourism

The tensions between Turkey and Greece are not only political and military, they have also become conflicts over culture, heritage identity and tourism. Turkey recently launched a campaign to lure tourists with a ‘TurkAegean’ promotional campaign – against a backdrop of historic Greek sites and the sound of bouzouki music.

Turkey’s west coast faces the Aegean Sea, and Turkey claims the time has come to stop associating the region exclusively with Greece. But the campaign has caused anger and embarrassment in Athens. The ancient Greek name is derived from Aegeus, the father of the mythical king Theseus who founded Athens, and the Aegean’s Hellenic heritage has rarely been disputed.

Turkey filed a request with the EU a year ago to trademark the term ‘TurkAegean.’ Angry Greek politicians and officials were caught off guard and accused Turkey of usurping Greek culture. ‘Obviously the [Greek] government will exhaust every legal possibility to deal with this development,’ Prime Minister Mitsotakis said. Margaritis Schinas, the Greek vice-president of the European Commission, demanded a review of the decision.

The TurkAegean slogan is being used in advertising and promoting what Turkey is labelling its ‘coastline of happiness’ with ‘idyllic beaches to soak up the beaming sun.’ The classical and historical sites in the area include ancient Troy, Ephesus, once the most important Greek port in the Mediterranean, and sites dating back to the second century BCE.

‘It is not just an innocent advert but another argument that is being used to ultimately question our sovereignty over Greek islands in the Aegean,’ the former foreign minister and Syriza MP, George Katrougalos, was quoted as saying. ‘… the term implies, as a corollary of their propaganda, that all, or most, of the Aegean is Turkish and that is clearly wrong.’

Analysts do not rule out these tensions escalating into a military clash, either deliberately or by accident. ‘There has been a very aggressive, almost apocalyptic upgrading of Turkish claims in the Aegean,’ Professor Constantinos Filis of the American College of Greece has warned. ‘It is like Turkey is preparing the international audience for what could possibly lie ahead.’

Fishing boats and tourist boats by night in the harbour in Fethiye, south-west Turkey (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

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For many decades, Turkey accepted the maritime boundaries in the Aegean, defined by treaties and agreements with the Italians in 1923 and 1932, and ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1947. The boundaries were never challenged until 1996, when Turkish journalists from the daily Hurriyet landed on the tiny Imia islets, tore down the blue and white Greek flag and hoisted the red and white star and crescent of Turkey.

As the crisis deepened, I was sent as a journalist to Rhodes and Kos to look at the potential of war. Two years later, I wrote in The Irish Times how, looking across the narrow strait that separates 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 …’

This year marks the centenary of the Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1922 and its culmination in the massacre of Smyrna and the military defeat for Greece. Erdoğan repeatedly invokes that war, saying that, 100 years on, Greece should not be bristling for a fight that it would once again ‘regret’.

Canon Patrick Comerford blogs daily at www.patrickcomerford.com. This feature was originally prepared for the ‘Church Review’ (Dublin and Glendalough)

Greeks plan new start for Games

Letter from Athens
Patrick Comerford

Metal hoarding still dominates the south side of Syntagma Square in the centre of Athens, and the signs of construction work for the new metro line can still be seen throughout the city. But in recent weeks, work on the metro has contributed a lot less to traffic chaos in the Greek capital that the protests by students and teachers or the intermittent strikes by trolley and bus drivers.

Driving through Athens demands great patience at the best of times. But Greeks are more tolerant of the chaos created by construction work on the metro than they are of protests and strikes - at least the metro promises to bring some relief to the traffic jams and bottlenecks. And they point out that the new metro, the planned new airport and a new highway all helped to secure the 2004 Olympics for Greece.

The failure to secure the centenary games in 1996 was a blow to Greek national pride and honour. In the early 1990s, there was a feeling throughout the country that Greece had some proprietary hold over the games, and the Atlanta games allowed many to sneer at the over-commercialisation of the Olympics. Now Greeks are determined to ensure that when the games come to Athens in 2004, the world will recall their Greek origins and the fact that the original Olympics were about more than sport.

Greeks believe the Olympic Games ought to be more than a staged athletic event of limited duration every four years. The original games had a cultural dimension too: during the ancient games all wars ceased between the Greek city-states, and the four-year period between each Olympic Games was counted as an Olympiad.

Now the Greek Minister of Culture, Prof Evangelos Venizelos, has seized the opportunity provided by the Athens games in 2004 to promote the concept of the Cultural Olympiad. Throughout the four-year period between successive games, Dr Venizelos wants to see the Cultural Olympiad as a fixed event consisting of a series of important cultural occasions of international importance.

He first presented the idea of the Cultural Olympiad to UNESCO in Paris last year, when it received unanimous acceptance. “Everyone understands that culture is an appropriate field for international co-operation,” he says. “On this basis, new institutions need to be established”, and he hopes his new enterprise will be established and working within the period 2000 to 2004.

The Cultural Olympiad will consist of a series of major cultural events of international interest, organised throughout the four-year period between successive games and in co-operation with the host cities.

But it is easy to assess participants in sporting Olympics – the fastest, the highest, the strongest, compete with each other. How could a Cultural Olympiad hope to standardise and numerically assess events and entrants? And the Greeks who have put forward the idea of a Cultural Olympiad are also aware that culture is not always an agent for the Olympian ideals of friendship, co-operation, understanding and co-existence: cultural differences have also caused political and military conflicts.

Mrs Sophia Hiniadou, the adviser to the Ministry of Culture with responsibility for the Cultural Olympiad, is aware of the danger of commercialisation, and at the same time wants to ensure the international dimension of the whole endeavour in a context of cultural pluralism and tolerance.

Four clear themes have emerged for the Cultural Olympiad: the culture of peace, co-existence and reconciliation; the culture of social cohesion and non-exclusion; the culture of the information society; and culture as a meeting place for tradition and innovation.

According to Mrs Hiniadou, the first Cultural Olympiad will open with the 2000 Sydney games and will end with 2004 Athens games. The plans for the opening include the “electronic kindling” of the Olympic Torch of Culture on the Internet, with a message of peace and social cohesion and of the Internet as a network of solidarity through knowledge and communication.

In Greece, the organisers plan to take advantage of the existing infrastructure provided by the country's cultural heritage, including ancient theatres, castles and large archaeological sites. The opening events will include an international conference on the state of culture at the dawn of third millennium, and will be staged in major symbolic venues such as the Lyceum of Aristotle and the Academy of Plato in Athens, Ancient Olympia, Delphi, Epidavros, Vergina, and Ancient Mieza.

The celebrations for 2000 coincide with the celebration of the sixth Greek Millennium, which is being marked with a multiple exhibition – “Axion Esti, the Millennia of Hellenism” – opening simultaneously in Athens, Rome, Egypt, China, New York, Japan, Sydney and Moscow. Later, events between 2001 and 2003 will include the simultaneous staging of anti-war works from the classic repertoire – tragedies such as The Trojan Women and The Suppliant Women, and comedies such as Aristophanes Lysistrata – in all the major Greek and Roman theatres throughout the Mediterranean basin.

To ensure that the Cultural Olympiad is not a once-only event to coincide with the Athens games, the Greek government has helped to establish the International Foundation for the Cultural Olympiad. The foundation has its secretariat in ancient Olympia and in Athens, and the international governing committee includes the director-general of UNESCO, Mr Federico Mayor, the president of the International Olympic Committee, and the Greek Minister of Culture.

Although the foundation recognises that the Cultural Olympiads will need a competitive element to ensure their success, Mrs Hiniadou is aware of the danger of their degenerating into some form of “beauty contest” similar to the Eurovision Song Contest, or of their being commercialised in the same way as the Atlanta games.

However, she is also keen to dismiss any idea that this is an effort from Athens to reclaim the Olympics as Greek cultural property. She points out that Greece first gave the world the concept of the Olympics. “It’s our duty to save what we gave in the beginning. Athens 2004 is a good opportunity to start anew,” she says.

This feature was published in The Irish Times on 8 December 1998

Time for the Parthenon Marbles to be sent home

Letter from Athens
By Patrick Comerford

A brush fire broke out recently in the ancient Agora at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens, briefly threatening 2,500-year old monuments before being brought under control.

Tourists watched as fire fighters battled burning trees and bushes inside the site that was the ancient market and meeting place of Athens, and smoke billowed up towards the Acropolis and the Parthenon.

Temperatures and winds have caused hundreds of forest fires throughout Greece this summer, and the fire at the foot of the Acropolis came only weeks after the long dispute over the Parthenon Marbles grew more heated. In a new book, the British historian William St Clair claims cleaners at the British Museum irreparably damaged them 60 years ago by scrubbing them with metal scrapers.

As St Clair’s book was being published, the British government once again rejected renewed demands from the Greek Culture Minister, Mr Evangelos Venizelos, for an international commission to decide the fate of the Parthenon Marbles, known in the museum as the Elgin Marbles.

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, was British ambassador to the Ottoman Court in Istanbul when he stripped much of the surviving inner frieze and most of the pediment sculptures from the Parthenon, shipped them off to England in 1802, and sold them to the British Museum in 1816.

Elgin had stretched the powers of an Ottoman permit allowing him to collect inscriptions and slabs from the Acropolis, and in their rushed efforts his crews greatly damaged the temple.

“Instead of removing things slowly and safely they hacked away and mutilated,” says Dr Manolis Korres, the architect in charge of a major restoration project at the Acropolis. “They pushed three-tonne ledges from 15 metres high, shattering them and damaging the base of the temple.”

St Clair alleges the damage caused to the marbles 60 years ago was covered up by the trustees of the British Museum. Over a period of 15 months from 1938 to 1939, the marbles were cleaned by workers who used copper tools to remove what they believed was dirt but was in reality the honey-coloured patina of the surface.

The museum standing committee found that “through improper efforts to improve the colour of the Parthenon sculpture … some important pieces had been greatly damaged”, and disciplinary action was taken against two officials. Frederick Pryce, then keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities, was given leave to retire because of ill-health, and his assistant, Roger Hinks, who later resigned, was formally reprimanded for neglect of duty.

It is generally believed the cleaning was ordered by Sir John Soames, then director of the British Museum, at the request of Lord Duveen, who had commissioned a new gallery to house the sculptures.

However, in public the museum denied using a blunt copper tool. In a letter to the Times in 1939, George Hill claimed the cleaning method involved only soap and water and any resulting damage was imperceptible to the untrained eye. But Arthur Holcombe, the museum's chief cleaner, later admitted that when a solution of soap and water and ammonia had failed “to get some of the dirtier spots, I rubbed the marbles with a blunt copper tool.”

A new controversy over the cleaning of the marbles surfaced in 1983, when the museum was accused of speeding up the process of decay by coating the caryatid with a supposedly protective plastic. That year, the then Greek Minister of Culture, Melina Mercouri, began a vigorous campaign for the return of the marbles, saying: “I believe the time has come for these marbles to come home to the blue skies of Attica.”

Her successor, Mr Venizelos, says: “The request for the restitution of the Parthenon Marbles is not made by the Greek government in the name of the Greek nation or of Greek history. It is made in the name of the cultural heritage of the world and with the voice of the mutilated monument itself, that cries out for its marbles to be returned.”

In Britain, the campaign to have the marbles restored to Greece has received the support of writers such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Tariq Ali and John Fowles.

However, the British Museum and government insist the marbles will stay in London, although previous Labour leaders, including Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot, supported their return.

Earlier this year, the Mail on Sunday claimed the British Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, had said in private he was sympathetic to calls for the return of the marbles. Former arts minister, Mark Fisher, is a known supporter of the demand to return the marbles. A long-awaited Acropolis Museum is being built near the Parthenon to house the marbles, and Mr Fisher believes Greece has now met many of the British objections to their return.

In recent years Greece has demonstrated a commitment to preserving its archaeological heritage. Alarmed by the rapid crumbling of the Minoan palace at Knossos, archaeologists in Crete are trying to rescue the 5,000-year-old site from further damage by the millions of tourists who visit it each year in search of a unique glimpse of Europe's oldest civilisation. A 700 million drachma (£1.6 million) restoration project is expected to be completed by the end of the century.

Last month it was announced that the five marble lions on the island of Delos, prized as beacons of Greek antiquity, are to be moved indoors to save them from salt erosion and pollution. The lions, dating from 700 BC, will be replaced by copies next year.

But the most ambitious restoration programme in Greece is currently under way on the Acropolis.

Of the 97 surviving blocks of Parthenon frieze, 56 are in Britain and 40 in Athens; of the 64 surviving metopes, 18 are in Athens and 15 in the British Museum; in many cases, half a sculpture is in Athens and the other half in the British Museum.

Mr Venizelos says: “The most important monument of Western civilisation is mutilated. The Parthenon itself demands its marbles back.”

Roger Casement once wrote:

Give back the Elgin marbles, let them lie
Unsullied, pure beneath the Attic sky.
The smoky fingers of our northern clime
More ruin work than all ancient time …
Give back the marbles, let them vigil keep
Where art still lies, over Pheidias’ tomb

The marbles form an inseparable part of the Parthenon and their restitution would restore the unity of the decoration and the architectural cohesion of the monument. The 2004 Olympics in Athens would provide an ideal opportunity to return the Parthenon Marbles to Greece.

This ‘Letter from Athens’ was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on 4 August 1998

Dictionary lifts the lid on Greeks

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.

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 institution, 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 with a Moorish inner courtyard and a 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 and 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 invaded and conquered them in 1522.

This ‘World View’ column was first published in ‘The Irish Times’ on Saturday 13 June 1998