Journal

Symi proved to be delightful – its better preserved bits showing evidence of considerable past concentrations of wealth, but with a surprising number of buildings in various stages of dereliction. was struck here, once again, by the way that rackety scooters and motorbikes weave their way through people on the waterfront, and alongside the restaurants at night. Am sure this traffic has its charms for some, and is no doubt necessary, but would gladly do without the noise and risk to limb, if not life.

Meanwhile, keep plowing through books. In addition to Merlin, the story of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, books I have read during the trip include: Omar al Akkad’s What Strange Paradise; Mick Heron’s Bad Actors; Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly; and Stephen Ambrose’s The Wild Blue, about the American B-24 crews in WW2, which I bought at the wonderful Le Flaneur rare book shop in Datça – where we went to have our passports stamped for entry back into Turkey.

Two books I have also been nibbling at are Ian Morris’s Geography Is Destiny and Antony Beevor’s Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921. And then two other members of the group passed on books they had read on the trip: Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, a novel written from the point of view of elephants, and David Davis’s One River, an exploration of the medicinal plants and hallucinogens of Amazonia.

Then we sailed on to Knidos this evening.

I was last in Rhodes in 1959, the largest of the Dodecanese Islands, as the Elkington family returned home from our tour in Cyprus. What I remembered most were the huge fortifications and the stack of stone cannonballs. Nor did they disappoint as I had imagined they might, partly because the giant tour ships have been pushed away from the harbour, so they don’t dwarf what were equally gigantic constructions in their own day.

The scale of the tourist industry beyond the Old Town beggars belief, as we saw as we sailed in along the coast. A useful summary of relevant history of the Old Town can be found here. Elaine and I found a wonderful restaurant – the Café Auvergne – at the foot of the Street of the Knights. Highly recommended.

We were introduced to the ruins of Our Lady of the Castle, a rare Gothic church in the region, to pebble mosaics, and to some of the extraordinary defensive architecture created by the Crusader Knights. The palace of the Grand Masters is stunning, though owing a good deal to the rebuilding – and ambitions – of the Italian occupation forces in the 1930s. First time I think I had seen the dating series tracking time from the founding of the Fascist state.

At the end of our second day in Rhodes, we head for Symi, a neoclassical port town whose pastel-coloured buildings tumble down the hills on either side of its bay.

Spectacular panoramic views – including across to Rhodes – from an eyrie tracking back to the Knights of St John. The large settlement beneath the castle was apparently tucked away there to hide it from pirates. Delicious lunch by the harbour front. Struck again by hard the Covid-related lockdowns have hit tourism across the region.

One highlight of the visit: the pygmy police cars that seem to have followed the same evolutionary curve as the pygmy elephants of nearby Tilos. Then across to Rhodes.

Tilos is generally seen as the greenest of the Dodecanese Islands, having switched entirely to renewable energy and, even more remarkably, having banned bird hunting. Would love to more about the politics that led to this outcome.

While on Tilos, we found our way to the precipitous heights occupied by the Monastery of St Panteleimon, with vertiginous views on the way up and down. We also learned more about the pygmy elephants found on the island, an example of so-called insular dwarfism, but not much to see on that front as yet, given that a museum is still under development. Would love to come back here.

This was another mind-bending visit, from our mooring in Mandraki. En route, we stopped off in the cove of Giali for a swim. Then passed a giant quarry on the island of Yali, that apparently extracts volcanic materials like pumice and perlite. long ago it was a key source of obsidian, too.

A sense of the history of mining in the region can be gained here. From the Internet, I learned that the miners are committed to sustainable development. Let’s see what that means when the site is worked out.

A good deal of quarrying must have gone into building the astonishing castle at Paliokastro, though the real astonishment lay in the close-cut, irregular masonry used to build the walls. Probably to ward off earthquakes, but strongly reminiscent of Inca stonework.

Going down into the crater that lurks at the heart of Nisyros was a special treat, though I wondered whether Elaine would manage with the smell of hydrogen sulphide – given that she had such problems at Larderello, Italy, when I was researching my book Sun Traps back in the 1980s. The reality turned out to be rather glorious, with the group drinking a local nut milk concoction under giant eucalyptus trees, whose prolific blossoms were thrumming with aerial legions of bees.

In the evening we headed up into a hilltop village that looks down on the crater, for a stunning meal in a little family-owned restaurant. Pretty sure that this was the Emporeiou taverna. Would love to go again if I happened to be passing.