Rhodes: A Stronghold of Memory
Rhodes Stone walls surround a medieval world in Rhodes. Its Old Town, constructed by the Knights Hospitaller, still resonates with the clatter of hoofs and prayer. On the Street of the Knights, the coats of arms are etched into lintels, the remnants of a crusading order that made this island its bulwark. The Palace of the Grand Master is a mass of towers and courtyards that speaks to the many empires — Byzantine, Ottoman, Venetian, Italian — that have swept to Rhodes.
Outside of its fortresses, the island opens its arms to nature’s embrace. At Anthony Quinn Bay, a narrow cover where turquoise water nips pine-framed cliffs, the beauty is more intimate than grand. The actor who once shot here left his mark on it; but the place also feels timeless — a quiet loop of the landscape where water, stone and sky fold together.
Even the long-gone Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, appears to float over the harbor.
Rhodes was born of light. Myth has it that when the sun god Helios took the island from the waves, he breathed his light over it, blessing its soil and people. His bronze effigy, the Colossus of Rhodes, used to straddle the harbor so that ships sailed underneath — although, truth be told, it straddled the side, not top. The statue was smashed to the ground by an earth-quake, but when the Rhodians were offered to rebuild it, they declined and said it was the will of the god for it to fall. There’s a remnant of Helios even in destruction: the island spends more days bathing in sunlight than almost anywhere in the world. The Knights Hospitaller still lingers in the medieval walls of Rhodes Town with their family crests set in stone on many a lintel and their auberges seemingly ready to set forth to war. Yet under the weight of the crusader stone is an assemblage of older faiths — Ottoman minarets, Byzantine churches, the Kahal Shalom Synagogue, with prayers rising there since the 16th century. In the high village of Embonas, villagers still guzzle souma, fierce and anise- scented, as old men tell stories of Lindian maidens who once seduced foolish knights to their deaths. History on Rhodes never hushes, it whispers in the surf, in the aroma of citrus and resin, in the sunshine that will not go down on Helios’s chosen isle.
