Enmeshed in a medieval city
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
8
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Rhodes,
Greece
Friday, January 27, 2006
Actually I was surprised by the size of the walls. The other historic castles which I have seen (no matter where) have nothing on Rhodes (these were as big as the walls of Troy should have been!). I didn't have a guidebook and I assumed it would be easy to find my way around as I am apt to do. It wasn't to hard to find my way about but a lot of walking was required - and I did it slowly as I took in the scenery.
Rhodes town is a medieval city. Let me offer a morsel of a history: It's the North East most city on an island that was occupied by Crusaders. It functioned as a headquarters for the meditareanean region until the 16th century, when after a long siege, the Knights of St. John surrendered to a gigantic Turkish flotilla. They were given the right to leave the city with freedom of passage (like the time in Jerusalem, as seen in the movie Kingdom of Heaven). They went off to Malta. You may have seen the Maltese Cross. It used to be known as the cross of the Knights of St. John.
Thereafter the Ottomans repaired the castle battlements and occupied the city, but as there was no warefare in the area, the island lost its importance as a trading centre. It became a backwater. As a result, the city maintained its medieval character which it (mostly) has to this day. About 80 years ago it was given to Greece, so these days Greeks live on the Island, and the city (now known as the old city) is deservedly a UNESCO world heritage city.
After shedding my pack at a drafty pension, I explored the city in which I intended to stay for only 2 days. Kudos again to my raingear for keeping the weather off of me.
And now to describe the city: Inside at first I saw narrow, deserted alleyways. The streets are made of flat, rounded pebbles cemented sideways (a peculiar sensation to walk on). Some streets are wider than others, some are only a few feet wide. There are old stone arches above some passages, and on top of some of these arches are wooden planks for rooms above. A few streets are covered for twenty or so feet, with mopeds parked beneath. There are some cars but many streets in the old town are too narrow for them. The buildings themselves are of two sorts: Official buildings and stores are made of a uniform beige stone. The houses are stone too, but less evenly assembled and oftentimes painted. One house is bright blue, but that is an exception.
For a medieval city in a European style it is strange that there are few churches, but the Turks ran the place for 400 odd years so it isn't unexpected. There are the odd churches (one has Byzantine frescos on display), but there are a handful of mosques too, and a few waterfountains of the muslim style; decorated walls with taps on the street for ritual cleansing. The official buildings, even in this city, look perfectly gothic in the modern sense of it but the construction is nearly too exquisite in some cases.
My first visit was the Palace of the Grand Master of the Order of the Knights of St. John. This place looks like a Muggle Hogwarts (palace from Harry Potter). Gigantic rooms with 20' ceilings, narrow passages, some tapestry, some paintings, lots of woodwork but comparitively sparse for a castle. Gigantic fireplaces here and there. I noticed a huge marble crest above one of them that was dedicated to the Emperor Victor Emmanuel in MCMXXXIX. I didn't fathom how that fit in. 1939 seemed like a bit of an anacronism. As I left I read another marble wall plate (a very large one with gilt lettering) written in Italian. It dedicated the restored palace to the Emperor of Italia, Albania and Abissinia (Ethopia) and to his chef Benito Mussolini in this 18th year of Fascism, 1940!
Creepy to see that relic. And there it all made sense. The even construction is very unmedieval (see my description of medieval construction as related in my entry on Kos) and it does look very modern: Even masonry and a certain perfectionism in the stones' organization. The Italians rebuilt all sorts of stuff when they took over the island during the second world war.
Outside the old city: 10 meters or more of walls (up to 20 in some places) surround the city, as do two moats and an extra defensive wall on the land sides. The walls are similar to those of Kos in style but they are a bit more uniformly sandstone in construction. Kos' castle is tiny to that of Rhodes, and there is little of ancient stone in the walls, if any, because the walls are so big that all the marble in Ephesus wouldn't make a few hundred yards of wall. They are sandstone, some old and eroded, some more recently restored, some restored a long time ago when the conquering Turks rebuilt the walls for their defence. The perimeter of the walls is (my guess) three kilometers. In trying to prevent them from being blasted to pieces by the famous Turkish cannons, the Grand Masters of old widened the walls, widened the moats, and introduced "tongues," secondardy walls outside of the city to be used (coarsely said) as cannon fodder. These walls would be blasted first and twenty meter moats are on both sides of them. Amazing to imagine what the Turks in the 16th century must have had to make the Knights of St. John surrender. Must have been impressive ordinance.
My second day (Wednesday) in Rhodes brought a surprise. A twenty story cruise ship came into Rhodes harbour and dwarfed everything. The empty medieval city was resurected to life in the 21st century as shop owners came in from tangerine picking and goat herding to cop some tourist dollar. Suddenly Rhodes didn't seem so old anymore as mass produced neclaces, hats, shirts, etc were for sale and canopies sheltered brightly attired Western Europeans. The only medieval thing that day was that, like the medieval city was multilingual, the streets of Rhodes heard utterance again in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, and English. But my quaint vision of a medieval city was tarnished. I cannae picture enjoying the city in the summer if 7 boats like the one I saw arrive every day as they tell me they do.
In the course of the next days, I saw the city graveyard - a cinder brick wall divided the muslim side from the orthodox side - I took a bus to see the quaint Hellenic city of Lindos, and I found out that I would have to wait until Friday for the boat back to Turkey, desipite much advertising to the contrary. As I walked about the city, scores of travel agencies adverts procliamed daily ferries to multiple Turkish destinations. Apparently the travel companies see so few visitors in the winter that they don't bother to remove false advertising (one locked door had the word "open" painted on it). In the end I found out that only one Turkish company operated a ferry in the winter. It sailed next on Friday afternoon (the 27th), which meant that I would have to stay a day and a half more than I planned (I wanted to set sail Thursday morning). Ultimately I slowed things down until Friday morning when I went to see my Travel agent.
This agent heralded bad news. When I set up my ferry ticket a few days before, he asked for the telephone number at my pension "just in case" he needed to talk to me. I appreciated that because, like in Kos, there was a chance that the ferry would be cancelled. I stopped in Friday morning to verify that all was okay and it wasn't. The agent said that the ferry was cancelled. The next one would be on the afternoon of the 31st of January. That was not good news. I had planned to be just about done Turkey by then.
He and I discussed my options. I could take a plane that day, fly to Athens, fly to Istanbul (both of which are snowy) and then take a bus to Marmaris. Did I mention that I can see the Turkish mainland from Rhodes harbour? This is the 21st century, ladies and gentlemen, where it may be faster to fly 3000 km than to sail 15 kilometers (okay Marmaris is 2 hours away but I could get to the Turkish mainland in 15 minutes - but to hire a private boat costs a billfold of Euros that make the cost of a few flights look like bus fare).
I examined the cost and opportunity cost to the options presented to me and decided that I was not willing to spend as much money as was required to take the flight option (not bus fare to me!). Somewhere around that time the agent picked up a telephone and found out that there was a fifty-fifty chance that the boat would sail from Turkey to Rhodes and back on the 28th. I decided to chance it and wait for that boat...
