Rhodes: the new invaders

A stone bridge joining West and East, Rhodes is the quintessence of an intact, habitable Middle Ages, always a crossroads of a thousand cultures, invaded by greedy, grasping peoples, home to one of the most prestigious and celebrated medieval knightly orders, the Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem. Arriving by ship is a timeless emotion: before us stretch out like brown canvases the ancient medieval walls willed and defended by the Knights of the Order, an intact, impenetrable ring, a reminder of many lives lost, many battles won, sieges and unfinished conquests. Rhodes has always suffered, always. And it suffers, in my view, even today from the hordes of indiscreet tourists and the new greed of its population, which has turned the centre, in a bizarre commercial metamorphosis, into a gigantic bazaar, where everything is bought and everything is sold... A shame.

The rest is a luxury enriched by glimpses of rare beauty for the eyes of a lover of the Middle Ages like me: I go wild walking slowly along the old, dry moat, among immense stone ramparts, the towers peeking out amid lush vegetation, rock arches decorated in style, old Arab baths, Turkish mosques on Christian churches, synagogues opened for the first time to infidel eyes, marks of the Middle Ages, a cruel and pitiless age, but the political, religious and social basis of what we are today. Rhodes has always got the fundamental alliances of History wrong: first with Athens, it didn't go well; then with Rome, it went no better, in fact in 42 BC the furious Cassius brutally disfigured it, stealing 3,000 works of art bound for Rome; then it was besieged by the Persians, the Seljuks, the Byzantines and the pirates.

Finally sold by the Genoese for a pittance to the Knights of St John in 1309, who stayed here 213 years, making the city an impregnable fortress, but not for the Ottoman Turks of Suleiman, who took possession of it in 1522 after a tragic and exhausting siege. The Turks didn't leave until shortly after World War II, after an interlude of us Italians, to pass definitively into the hands of the new Greek government. And it's truly surprising that almost 500 years of Turkish rule left so few marks: a few mosques, a destroyed Christian church, other little churches turned into stables, Turkish baths etc., but the city is a faithful copy of the chivalric one.

Beautiful! Rhodes, which myth would have created by Zeus for his son Apollo, to whom no land had yet been assigned, was home to one of the seven wonders of the Ancient World, the Colossus of Rhodes, myth or reality? Who knows, the doubt about its existence remains, but today many who arrive on these walls care nothing about all that, nor will they even remember its name, or the 2,000 Jews rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, or the Knights who found refuge after fleeing Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, or the majestic Street of the Knights, the street where knights speaking the same language found rest in their "linguistic" inns...

no, who cares, the important thing is to stick with the group, follow a wheezing, croaking guide who yells at them with her red umbrella to follow her, slipping through the human crush, trying to be quick, to take the money and send these tourists home again, onto the boats or to the hotel, or worse towards the little souvenir shops that wait for the tourist like a spider for its fly.... Despite all this, the city and the island deserve a holiday; they deserve it because here part of the history of the glorious and inglorious age of the Crusades was made, here in this corner of the world, at the dawn of Christianity, was made the history of ancient Greece, of the Byzantine Empire, of the holy Crusaders, of the Ottoman one, of today's Turkey, of today's Greece.

Rhodes, even though the new invaders are perhaps the worst ever seen under these walls, offers what the traveller has really come here to seek, on the island of Apollo. Andrea