Rhodes
Back to the world's most leisurely and intermittently updated travelogue! Today's topic is the island of Rhodes.
Rhodes was the stop on the trip I was most looking forward to. I'd heard it had a very well preserved set of medieval fortifications, though I somehow managed not to see any photos of Rhodes before going there, which I think is ideal when it happens. It's nice to have something be a surprise for you on a trip, so that you're not simply visiting a collection of postcards that you saw ahead of time.
So, yeah, it was awesome to find that Rhodes is a walled city.
Walls notwithstanding, the city didn't seem to have a main fort as its focal point. Or maybe it used to, but the fort was destroyed at some point, or was now lying in unrecognizable ruins, like these along the landward side of the city walls.
Then again, perhaps the Palace of the Grand Masters was originally the city's main fort. We were told it was restored by Fascist Italians (more on that later). I wouldn't be suprised if they basically rebuilt it from the ground up.
So, anyway, a thing that makes Rhodes so cool is that these fortifications were all originally built by the Knights Hospitaller in the 14th and 15th centuries. To be honest, I think the walls of Rhodes and St. Peter's Castle in Bodrum, Turkey (more on that later), may be the best medieval European castles I've ever visited -- and yet they were hundreds of miles beyond the fringe of western Europe.
What's not cool, of course, is that the Knights conquered this island from their fellow Christians, the Greek Orthodox Byzantines, no doubt in the name of God.
But something they did that does show some tolerance was to divide their order into "tongues", one for each of the major languages spoken by their members -- and they counted Provençal as a language of its own, which indeed it is, though the modern French government says otherwise. They also counted Castilian and Aragonese as separate "tongues", and Wikipedia claims that even the language of the French province Auvergne was one of the tongues, though I didn't see this claimed in Rhodes's museums. (The other languages represented were English, German, French, and Italian.)
The main street along the inside of the city walls facing the sea was called the "Avenue of the Knights", and was lined with old stone buildings, many of which were the headquarters of the "tongues". Two of them, the French and Italian, were even flying the modern flags of their respective nations.
Another cool thing about Rhodes was all the coats of arms sprinkled here and there, carved in stone and set in the walls, representing the families of Grand Masters and their lieutenants, no doubt.
A lot of places get billed as "where East meets West": Venice, Istanbul, etc. But of any of the ones I've been to, I think Rhodes may have the strongest claim. Where else can you see the shadow of a minaret across a Gothic window?
Uh, not that I actually did. But my point is, Rhodes has both Ottoman mosques AND Gothic architecture. And that's pretty damn cool. (The Ottoman mosques are because the Turks took the island in 1522.)
One more thing about Rhodes that's cool: as if all the above wasn't enough, it also has ancient Greek ruins. They're not inside the city of Rhodes itself, but in a town called Lindos, an hour's drive south along the coast of the island.
Lindos was evidently one of three ancient cities on the island that eventually decided to band together and found a new city, Rhodes. Lindos's ancient acropolis can still be visited, though the Knights Hospitaller added fortifications to it; and in the 1930s, Mussolini ordered its ruins "restored" -- i.e., replaced with modern replicas. I still remember visiting the Coliseum in Rome and being told that Mussolini had had that "restored" as well, and that modern archeologists have been trying ever since to undo his work.
It's an interesting footnote to history that the Dodecanese Islands (of which Rhodes is one) declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912 after it lost a war to Italy, but Italy occupied the islands and held onto them until WWII.
One last photo: the ancient residents of Lindos carved a ship from the living rock in the base of the acropolis. Pretty cool, hunh?
Rhodes was the stop on the trip I was most looking forward to. I'd heard it had a very well preserved set of medieval fortifications, though I somehow managed not to see any photos of Rhodes before going there, which I think is ideal when it happens. It's nice to have something be a surprise for you on a trip, so that you're not simply visiting a collection of postcards that you saw ahead of time.
So, yeah, it was awesome to find that Rhodes is a walled city.
Walls notwithstanding, the city didn't seem to have a main fort as its focal point. Or maybe it used to, but the fort was destroyed at some point, or was now lying in unrecognizable ruins, like these along the landward side of the city walls.
Then again, perhaps the Palace of the Grand Masters was originally the city's main fort. We were told it was restored by Fascist Italians (more on that later). I wouldn't be suprised if they basically rebuilt it from the ground up.
So, anyway, a thing that makes Rhodes so cool is that these fortifications were all originally built by the Knights Hospitaller in the 14th and 15th centuries. To be honest, I think the walls of Rhodes and St. Peter's Castle in Bodrum, Turkey (more on that later), may be the best medieval European castles I've ever visited -- and yet they were hundreds of miles beyond the fringe of western Europe.
What's not cool, of course, is that the Knights conquered this island from their fellow Christians, the Greek Orthodox Byzantines, no doubt in the name of God.
But something they did that does show some tolerance was to divide their order into "tongues", one for each of the major languages spoken by their members -- and they counted Provençal as a language of its own, which indeed it is, though the modern French government says otherwise. They also counted Castilian and Aragonese as separate "tongues", and Wikipedia claims that even the language of the French province Auvergne was one of the tongues, though I didn't see this claimed in Rhodes's museums. (The other languages represented were English, German, French, and Italian.)
The main street along the inside of the city walls facing the sea was called the "Avenue of the Knights", and was lined with old stone buildings, many of which were the headquarters of the "tongues". Two of them, the French and Italian, were even flying the modern flags of their respective nations.
Another cool thing about Rhodes was all the coats of arms sprinkled here and there, carved in stone and set in the walls, representing the families of Grand Masters and their lieutenants, no doubt.
A lot of places get billed as "where East meets West": Venice, Istanbul, etc. But of any of the ones I've been to, I think Rhodes may have the strongest claim. Where else can you see the shadow of a minaret across a Gothic window?
Uh, not that I actually did. But my point is, Rhodes has both Ottoman mosques AND Gothic architecture. And that's pretty damn cool. (The Ottoman mosques are because the Turks took the island in 1522.)
One more thing about Rhodes that's cool: as if all the above wasn't enough, it also has ancient Greek ruins. They're not inside the city of Rhodes itself, but in a town called Lindos, an hour's drive south along the coast of the island.
Lindos was evidently one of three ancient cities on the island that eventually decided to band together and found a new city, Rhodes. Lindos's ancient acropolis can still be visited, though the Knights Hospitaller added fortifications to it; and in the 1930s, Mussolini ordered its ruins "restored" -- i.e., replaced with modern replicas. I still remember visiting the Coliseum in Rome and being told that Mussolini had had that "restored" as well, and that modern archeologists have been trying ever since to undo his work.
It's an interesting footnote to history that the Dodecanese Islands (of which Rhodes is one) declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912 after it lost a war to Italy, but Italy occupied the islands and held onto them until WWII.
One last photo: the ancient residents of Lindos carved a ship from the living rock in the base of the acropolis. Pretty cool, hunh?