Greece 2010, Rhodes Town and an Unexpected Dinner Invitation

We enjoyed three days staying in the city and made a couple of other visits as well, the harbour was bustling with activity and although we didn’t especially like the new town the old town was spectacular with a castle and city walls, old churches and an abundance of historical sites. We explored the back streets and the ruins, some of which were the result of British bombing in 1944 which made us feel guilty.

On the first morning we woke early and went to the Street of the Knights because this is one of the best preserved/restored medieval streets in Europe and we wanted to get there before the crowds. As soon as the cruise ships arrive and discharge their guests onto the quayside hundreds of people make straight for this place and it immediately loses its atmosphere and its charm. At eight o’clock in the morning however there was no one about except the odd delivery man and it was possible to soak up the medieval ambiance of the place.

All of this medieval history is here on Rhodes because in 1309 the Island was occupied by forces of the Knights Hospitaller and under the rule of the newly named ‘Knights of Rhodes’ the city was rebuilt into a model of the European medieval ideal. Many of the city’s famous monuments, including the Palace of the Grand Master, were built during this period. The citadel of Rhodes, built by the Hospitalliers, is one of the best preserved medieval towns in Europe, which in 1988 was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Gradually however the strong walls which the Knights had built came under siege and withstood the attacks of the Sultan of Egypt in 1444, and of Mehmed II in 1480. Ultimately, however, Rhodes fell to the large army of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522 and the surviving Knights were permitted to retire to the Kingdom of Sicily before later moving their base of operations to the strategically placed island of Malta. The Knights had ruled the island for two hundred years but Rhodes was thereafter a possession of the Ottoman Empire for nearly four centuries and during this time the city acquired a characteristic eastern and Turkish culture and style.

In the nineteenth century the decline of the Ottoman Empire resulted in the general neglect of the town and its buildings, which further deteriorated due to strong earthquakes and in 1912, Italy seized Rhodes from the Turks. Under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, the island, together with the Dodecanese, was officially assigned to Italy.

The Italians would later demolish the houses that were built on and around the city walls during the Ottoman era. They also turned the Jewish and Ottoman cemeteries into a green zone surrounding the Medieval Town and whilst they preserved what was left from the Knights’ period they destroyed all of the Ottoman buildings. During the Second-World-War, following the Italian Armistice of September 8th 1943, the British attempted to get the Italian garrison on Rhodes to change sides but this was anticipated by the German Army, which succeeded in occupying the island. In 1948, together with the other islands of the Dodecanese, Rhodes was united with Greece.

In the morning we visited the City museum which was fascinating but had rather too many old pots to keep my interest for very long and an hour was long enough for both of us so we walked around the harbour and under the city walls around the gardens in what was once the defensive dry moat. We had learnt to say no with some authority by now and dodging the persistent waiters we explored the much quieter Turkish quarter before finding a bar with a shady spot for a lunch time drink.

Later in the afternoon while I sat on the terrace with a book Kim went to a Turkish bath for an exfoliation and a massage but I declined to join her because if truth be known I am quite attached to my dead skin and by this time I was nine days into a self cleansing experiment and a good scrubbing would have ruined it.

In the early evening we sat chatting to some people, a New Yorker and a young woman from Lichtenstein who worked together in Luxembourg as investment bankers and a student from Bosnia who studied at the University there. They were young show-offs really and I couldn’t help wondering why they weren’t at work sorting out the banking crisis that people like them at created rather than sitting around on holiday in Rhodes sailing and scuba diving but chatting to them turned to our advantage when we received an unexpected dinner invitation.

The room owners Sofia and Phillip were cooking for them and as they prepared the tables they invited us to join them for a home prepared meal of dolmades and possibly the best beef stifado we have ever tasted. We had an excellent meal and swapped increasingly boastful travel stories and Sofia told us all about Greek cuisine. We have the recipe for the stifado but we are pessimistically certain that it will take some recreating to achieve that authentic taste.

Greece 2010, Two Almost Similar Days in Lindos

The next day after breakfast we took the advice of our neighbours and took the bus to Pefkas which turned out to be an unremarkable little place but as promised it did have a very nice beach. There were a few sun beds and umbrellas at €8 a time but also plenty of space left over for blanket people like us. The sea was nice and deeper than Lindos so swimming was better and if I had had room in my luggage for a snorkel I am certain there would have been plenty of fish to watch.

It was a nice spot with a cool breeze and the sound of gentle lapping waves but, as I have explained before, we are not really beach people and two hours is generally more than enough. We have never owned up to this to each other but I suspect we are both secretly hoping that the other one will be the first to say the magic words ‘shall we pack up then and go and have a drink?’ and certainly there has never really been any debate on this matter that I can ever remember. And so it was today and as boredom levels began to rise we packed up and strolled back to the bus stop stopping on the way in the centre for a Mythos.

Like most places on Rhodes, and indeed Lindos, there were some restaurants and tavernas and they all had unnecessary pictures of the food on display boards outside. I really don’t like that and I don’t see the point of it either. Surely most people know what a chicken kebab looks like and if they want to see a picture of a moussaka they can see that every week in Tesco or Morrisons? And what’s more the pictures don’t generally look like what you are likely to get anyway so I find it all a bit distasteful and common. But then again Rhodes is an airport island and there were quite a lot of football shirts and tattoo people wandering about and they probably welcomed this sort of assistance with making dining selections.

The amount of tattoos on display was incredible and almost as many women as men with decorated bodies proudly showing them off. Personally I cannot understand why anyone, unless they are a Maori, would want to disfigure themselves in this way but here on Rhodes it seemed as though they were almost in the majority.

We caught the ten past two bus back to Lindos and once back at the Chrysa Studios Kim declared it too hot to do anything except enjoy the air conditioned room so I sat on the terrace for a while and then worried that I might be missing something in the village went for a walk to find some streets that we might have overlooked so far.

As I walked around the corkscrew lanes and became confused in the maze of alleys I found myself at the beginning of the path to the Acropolis so although we were planning to visit tomorrow, just out of curiosity I walked to the top to see how much it was going to cost. It was quite a climb and the well worn path was slippery and precipitous but at least I had had a practice ahead of the next day.

On the next day we had slipped completely into routine and we did the same things over again. First we had breakfast on the terrace and because we had liked the beach at Pefkas in preference to Lindos we caught the bus there for a second time. Two hours on the beach, a drink at the same bar and the ten past two bus back to Lindos.

For the afternoon we did plan something different and the visit to the Acropolis. We had waited until Sunday because sometimes museums and archaeological sites are free on Sunday so we thought it was worth the wait until the last day in Lindos. When the time came to tackle the steps and the walk Kim declared herself too hot and tired so I had to go alone and when I got there was disappointed to find that you do have to pay on a Sunday after all.

The walk and the climb to the entrance to the site actually turned out to be the easy bit because once inside there was an energy sapping ascent up a steep stone staircase with a sheer drop on each side to the entrance to the medieval fortress which was built by the Knight’s of Saint John in the fourteenth century to defend the island against the Ottoman Turks.

There were some good views from the top as I walked first through the foundations and the towers of the castle and the Byzantine church and then to the very top and the ancient Acropolis itself, the DoricTemple of Athena Lindia, the Propylaea of the Sanctuary, a huge staircase and a Hellenistic Stoa and finally the remains of a Roman Temple. Although hundreds of people visit this place every day four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon turned out to be a very good time to go indeed because there were no more than a dozen or so people here right now so it was easy to walk around and admire the ruins undisturbed.

They are ruins of course but some of the buildings and columns have been restored and in the twentieth century there was a lot of archeological and restoration work carried out by the Italians when they were in control here between the two world wars. Unfortunately some of the work they carried out wasn’t that good and as well as incorrectly reinterpreting some of the construction they also used poor quality materials and a lot of the reinforced concrete they used has begun to fail leading to even worse damage than they tried to rectify and most of this work is having to be done again at great cost under the supervision of the Greek Ministry of Culture.

It was still very hot and the walk had made me hungry and thirsty so I bought some pizza and beer and went back to the apartment where Kim was just about planning her shopping trip to the silver workshop having taken a couple of days to make up her mind which piece of jewellery she was going to buy.

In the evening we finally broke with routine and instead of Kamariko and the irritating waiter we found an alternative restaurant with a roof top terrace and we enjoyed a lazy meal in a cool breeze without waiter interruption and with free sweet and complimentary ouzo. This was our last night in Lindos, we had enjoyed it but we were ready to move on back to Rhodes town and over Metaxa on the balcony we reflected on our four days and made our plans for the next day.

Greece 2010, Lindos

There was no wind today and it was already hot on the balcony by breakfast time and unfortunately because of yesterday’s little accident there was no umbrella for shade. I walked to the mini-market for provisions and then we enjoyed a Lindian breakfast that we prepared for ourselves and ate on the terrace with its lovely view of the ancient and important village of Lindos. Here history stretches back over three thousand years and Lindos grew to prosperity under the Knights of St. John who built their fortress on the site of the ancient Acropolis. So much of the medieval village has survived that it has been declared a national landmark.

Because of its east coast location, Lindos is the hottest place on Rhodes and even in September by mid morning it was much too hot to sit on the terrace so we set off down the steep uneven steps towards the shady streets of the village and heading for the beach. Once past the steps where we had to watch every move it was a real delight to walk around the narrow streets with their traditional, distinctive, white and black chochlaki pebbled surface because no vehicles other than the odd delivery van are allowed inside. The village felt authentic because little or no changes can be made to the buildings, many of which have survived since the fifteenth century and the architectural style of the village is a mixture of Gothic, Byzantine Greek and middle Eastern influence.

Although there are no vehicles we did have to watch out for the donkeys that every day transport hundreds, probably thousands, of day visitors from the bottom of the village to the steps of the Acropolis and then back down again. I rode on a donkey here in 1997 and it seemed cruel so I vowed I wouldn’t do it again but later at lunchtime Mario explained that there are four hundred donkeys who work for two days and then get a day off and that working is good for them because they live an average twenty-one years which is seven years longer than a donkey that has nothing to do and I have to confess that they did look healthy and well looked after. We didn’t go on one though!

Eventually after a long descent we reached the first small beach which was full of sun loungers and umbrellas for people who stay there all day and no room to put down a towel for people like us who only stay for an hour or so. Not being prepared to pay €8 for the beds we continued to walk towards the main larger beach where there was some space on the stony scruffy bits behind the umbrellas where it was at least possible to make our own arrangements.

We swam in the sea and that was nice but we didn’t really like the beach all that much because it was much too organized for us with regimented rows of sun beds all crammed together in such a way as to make it difficult for cheapskates like us to put our towels down and avoid the charge and let’s face it €8 is quite a lot of money that we calculated would soon add up over a fortnight’s holiday. As well as the sun beds there were pedaloes, canoes, diving instruction and water sports and on balance we preferred the rock on Symi so we didn’t stay too long.

After a cold drink at a busy beach bar we walked back into the village which was bustling now with coach loads of visitors pushing and shoving through the narrow streets. There was a pretty whitewashed church at the bottom of the village which was built by the Knights in the fourteenth century and had some lovely frescoes and decorated floors but as there was an entrance charge and photography was forbidden we made do with admiring it through the door without going inside.

After lunch at Mario’s again we explored the other side of the village where the shops and bars petered out to be replaced with narrow streets of local houses where the smell of fresh moussaka and tide washing powder seeped out from behind the windows and doors. At the far end of the village there was an ancient amphitheatre, almost two thousand five-hundred years old and so adjacent to the modern buildings that it is certain there are more hidden treasures concealed below them which must have archaeologists drooling with anticipation.

Back at the apartment by late afternoon the terrace was much more comfortable now because the sun had swung to the west and was disappearing quickly behind the mountain range backbone of the island and by six o’clock the entire village was in shadow with only the massive outcrop of rock and the Acropolis remaining bathed in early evening sunshine. It was delightful so we sat for a while and enjoyed it and when it got dark we changed and went for evening meal at the same restaurant where the same irritating waiter pestered us again but the food was excellent so whilst we would rather that he hadn’t we didn’t really mind.

On the way out Kim convinced me that there was an alternative way down but it turned out that this was really just a ruse to make sure we passed a silver jewellery workshop directly below the apartments where she had a great time looking at the sparkly things on display and debating which particular piece to buy.

Pete and Jane and their friends John and Zoe were on the balcony so we joined them and Jane introduced us to the joys of Greek Metaxa brandy which we declared such a liking for we thought we might buy a bottle for ourselves the next day. We told them that we hadn’t especially enjoyed the beach experience at Lindos and with their extensive local knowledge of the area they recommended that we should try the beach at the next village of Pefkas instead which they assured us was quieter and less organized.