Rhodes entered my life in a Latin class at the Tuzla high school. The professor we called Pop – I later learned that he was a post-pope – wrote 100 Latin proverbs on the blackboard. Through thorns to the stars. As long as I live, I hope. The die is cast.
One of them was: Hic Rhodus – hic salta! Here is Rhodes – here jump!
The priest also told us an Aesop's fable in which a pentathlete constantly boasted about his long jumps in Rhodes. This braggart – today we would call him a grandiose man with a narcissistic personality disorder – was so annoying to those around him that someone in the company broke the film and exclaimed: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! The Munchausens of this world do not like to prove what they claim. The braggart probably did not change the story, but the company did. Who knows if he was even in Rhodes.
But I did – I visited the island from the classical proverb and it no longer smelled like a high school Latin textbook but like the warm eastern Mediterranean, of salt, pomegranate, lemon, lamb and olives.
This is the story about that.
LAMB OF GOD
The flight from Leipzig was calm. The clouds thinned out as we went further south. There was not a single cloud over the Aegean Sea. Through the plane window, the islands looked like living tissue, intertwined with veins.
The airport is not far from the city of Rhodes. We settled in and went out into our first island twilight. We will spend ten days in Rhodes. We came for the Easter holidays. From Sunday to Monday the main church was packed. The Greeks welcomed with great joy the day when, according to Christian teaching, life celebrated its victory over death. Rhodes is close to the place where Jesus was born and executed, this is the Greek Orient.
The next day we headed back to the center and the harbor, above which the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, supposedly stood astride twenty-five centuries ago. The thirty-meter-high statue of Helios was made, they say, by a sculptor from Lindos, and was destroyed in an earthquake, so that in the dark chapters of history every trace of it is obscured. Legends say that the largest ships passed between his legs. Now, in the place where his footsteps supposedly were, at the entrance to the old harbor, two columns stand on Italian bronze symbols of the new Rhodes – a deer and a hind. The Church of the Annunciation, which we visited last night and which is right next to the harbor, is now empty. Silent in the sun, it had done its work the night before.
We walk through a city that wakes up late in the Mediterranean way. Religious holidays further remove people from the streets. They remain uniquely bare, exposed to the gaze of rare passersby like us. But people are milling around in front of taverns and cafes and in the very center. They shovel embers into metal troughs.
It is customary to find the Easter lamb on a spit. I see animals impaled on metal skewers on every corner. This time of year is apparently fatal for an entire generation of lambs in Greece.
Having had only a small breakfast, the smell of baking is already drawing us in. There is no room in one taverna on the coast – reservations are required. Greek families are already occupying the long tables. In the next taverna, a couple is just getting up from an ideal spot – a view of the Aegean Sea stretches across the lamb.
It was happy hour in a full tavern. The day was bright, the wine was nicely chilled, and the lamb – in competition with Herzegovinian, Pirot, Macedonian, and Turkish – won quite convincingly.
BAŠČARŠIJA ON THE ISLAND OF ŠOLTA
When I asked another Split resident, who had asked me something about the translation of a German writer, where I was, he said that he had been to Rhodes a long time ago, with his ex-girlfriend. And he added that Rhodes was great. That statement has a different weight when articulated by a Mediterranean man from the bottom of the barrel. I replied that on the first day I thought of Rhodes as a pretty Greek town with a lot of charm. But when I went to the fortress that embraced the Crusader-Ottoman čaršija the next morning, I realized that I had found myself in the middle of a unique beauty. People were orientally slow, it took me back to factory settings. I told the other that I had also experienced that slowness – preserved from the seventies – on Šolta. “The old town on Rhodes is like a tripled Baščaršija somewhere on Šolta.”
I got approval for this comparison – now you nailed it!
To reach the oriental anthill surrounded by stone walls, under pine nuts and cypresses, with gardens full of oranges and pomegranates, one must pass through the gate of the fortress, which was added to by all the rulers - the Romans, the Jovanovci, the Ottomans and - the Italians.
Thus, the aesthetics I love intersected in this place – Byzantine, French-German-Venetian, mature oriental from the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, and posh Italian with a slight pompous addition of Mussolini's megalomania – Italy seized Rhodes in 1912, only to have to cede it to Greece in 1947.
Eastern Rome ruled the island for almost 1000 years, with breaks filled by the Arabs. Then the Knights of St. John, who had lost the Holy Land, came to Rhodes. The Knights Hospitaller and Warrior Order had no master other than the Pope. The island was ruled by the Grand Master of the Order. The successors of the Knights of St. John stayed on the island long enough to leave their mark on it. The fortified Palace of the Grand Master and the Street of Knights next to it bear witness to this.
The Jovanovci were also called the "Visites of Rhodes". They were defeated in 1522. They left the island and went to Malta - hence the current name of the Order of Malta. The troops of Suleiman the Magnificent entered the city. The Suleiman's Mosque was built on the central plateau.
Right next to it is the Hafiz Ahmet-aga Library, founded in 1793 by an Ottoman nobleman born into a prominent family a few kilometers away. He furnished it with 1.995 manuscripts from all fields of Islamic science. The librarians were also teachers of Arabic, as the manuscripts were mostly in that language.
I was lucky that the gate was open, the garden with orange trees welcomed me like a man who knows that reading a book in the shade of an orange tree is a gift given only to a few.
The Library, which is on the UNESCO World Heritage List, currently houses 1256 manuscripts, including a Quran from 1540, a history of the Turkish siege of the city from 1522, and manuscripts with Persian miniatures. The walls are lined with old maps and engravings.
We leave the courtyard and merge with the river of people that gently descends down Sokratova Street. In it, as well as in the labyrinth of side streets, the tourist's heart will find its more or less expensive souvenir. Leather, textiles, ceramics, souvenirs. But also cafe gardens like Sokratova vrtan.
RHODES IS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN A PICTURE
My companion, over coffee in that very garden, looking through the pictures, said that there is a difference between many other places and Rhodes – in other places, photographs of beautiful motifs are more beautiful than what the eye can see. And Rhodes, in the eye of the beholder, always remains more beautiful than even the most beautiful photograph.
Of course, during those ten days we experienced quiet mornings in the old town. But when the cruise ships docked down in the harbor and spewed out their tourist sensation hunters, the old town's alleys would quickly become clogged with crowds of people.
Then we would venture deeper into the labyrinth of stone streets. This meandering through byways and dead ends gave us immense pleasure. Every corner, every side passage, every stone wall over which flowers bloomed, was as hauntingly beautiful as the main sights.
The play of light and shadow, the architectural handwriting of centuries, the smell of barbecue, coffee, leather, fruit and the salty wind from the harbor, the colors that flicker in the afternoon sun, the mixture of languages, intoxicated us every day anew.
We cruised through the old town, one of the largest in Europe, length and breadth. And when we left – we were sorry. Wandering through this unique area in many ways elevated Rhodes in my eyes to the level of those places that, like Granada, Palermo, Chania, Lisbon's Alfama, somewhere deep inside themselves preserve all the layers of the past. And it always sings sad-sweet songs.
DEPARTURE FROM THE LAND OF POMEGRANATE
If one examines the names that people have given to cities, mountains, rivers, seas, and islands, one will always come across a story worth telling. Rhodes is no exception. At first, they thought it was the ancient Greek name for the rose. But roses came from Asia much later than the time when Rhodes appeared in human memory under that name. The Phoenicians, however, were closer to the source of the word for pomegranate. It was later taken over by the Greeks.
So, Rhodes is not a rose but a pomegranate.
Much later, a story arose about the nymph Rhode, wife of the sun god Helios, receiving an island as a gift from her husband, which he pulled from the depths of the sea. What other wife can boast of such a gift?
I can't stop thinking about words when I say goodbye to the things they signify.
I have to note that I immediately fell in love with the stone steps, where someone had painted each step a different color. It wasn't the idea of the tourist workers, it was done by some old town host. Here, inside the walls, in a world-famous open-air museum, several thousand people live. The man has embellished the access to his terrace.
I wish I had told you something about the Monk cafe where we regularly had our morning coffee. Or about the incredible color of the sea, about the sunset that would put any postcard to shame. About the market building that seemed to have been copied from some far-off eastern city.
I wish I had said more about the great food, the beautiful wine. About the old trees with such mighty crowns that it takes your breath away. However, I will tell you a short story about a door.
Once, while walking through the alleys of the old town, we stopped by someone's entrance. It's not a landmark for others. It is for us. The man came up with a way to make up for the excess stone and lack of paint. He painted his entrance. That gate, so unusual, makes me happy. This is not a place where people speak quietly, nod their heads meaningfully and think about the past like in a museum. This is a place where people revive their steps and gates with fresh colors. A place that is two and a half millennia old, yet shows a young will to live. A place that certainly deserves to have a pomegranate in its name.
Bonus video:
