Hic Rodus, hic salta!

An introduction

When the silhouette of the Old City of Rhodes first pierced the tightrope horizon, and the domes, spires and minarets began to emerge out of the morning haze, I was standing on the deck of an old Baltic ferry, boarded in Cyprus. I had recognized the ship from my childhood, when it had plied the Malmó-Copenhagen route I used to take with my grandfather Salomon on the way to the Copenhagen Zoo. Like many Mediterranean passenger vessels it had been banished out of service by stern Scandinavian safety ordinances, and then given a new lease on life in Classic waters, though signs and lifesaving instructions were all still in Danish.

At Cyprus I had left the Haifa-Athens liner, and set out for Crete, where I would meet my parents. I was on Passover vacation from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I went ashore in Rhodes after a spur-of-the-moment decision, sparked by the dictum Hic Rodus, hic salta! which I understood as "Here is Rhodes, jump ship now" – or generally: "Honour thine impulses!" The categorical imperative of my generation was: "Do not succumb to the forces of order and organization." Long-term life-strategies, in the guise of mortgages, marriages or job-oriented studies, were religiously avoided in my circles. One's independence should be continuously attested and earned by rash and un-expedient choices. We were proud to travel without an itinerary – even when not on holiday. This attitude set my career, and a few others, back quite some years, but it let me explore the shores of the Mediterranean calmly, relieved of the performance-anxiety that is turning today's first-year students into sombre little grown-ups.

(I was wrong, however. Hic Rodus, hic salta! – the moral of one of Aesop's fables – is not a call for bohemian decision-making, but almost the opposite: "Don't brag about your feats, perform them here and now!")

I rushed ashore to the harbour-master's office, where I learned that there would be a wheat-dispatch to Crete via Karpathos that Wednesday, taking ten passengers, which left me more than eighty hours to inspect Rhodes.

I studied ancient philosophy at the time, and doted on things Greek. Our classics' teacher, a religious Jew from New York, had read to us, with stony disapproval, Josephus Flavius' account of fawning Herod's trip to Rhodes in 31 BCE. The old cynic had gone there to pledge allegiance to an even greater one, the future emperor Augustus, who had just crushed Marc Antony's fleet at Actium and swept all opposition off the board. Of later Rhodian annals I knew little, but I hoped the formidable walled-in bourg of the Crusader knights, its joints creaking with history, with the thinkers' coast of Asia Minor as its backdrop, would provide the congenial setting for some uplifting repose.

But I soon found out just how unsuitable the town was for romantic devotions. I had once marvelled at black-and-white Rhodian street-scenes in an old library book. The alleys there had been discreetly populated, showing a robed priest here, a solitary donkey there or a decorative black widow against a whitewashed wall. But the thing itself was under a veritable siege of unpicturesque beings, speaking a Babel of un-classic tongues. What really made me shudder was the daily posting of German and Swedish tabloid news-bills outside the kiosks.

Touring the whimsical alleys of Cavalier knights, Ottoman pashas and Spanish Rabbis, now lined with souvenir outlets, one had to crane one's neck above the throng to get the street-level vanities out of one's frame of vision, while struggling to stay clear of eager bazaar-men. To pause and meditate in front of an emblazoned portico, or admire a splash of crimson bougainvillea over hoary medieval ramparts, was often physically impossible, so intense was the pressure from hosts of holiday makers – some of them, surely, frustrated Schöngeiste like myself.

After half a mortifying day I had had enough. I jumped on a bus and bought a ticket to the end of the line. But the end of the line was only a short distance away, a sugarloaf hill southwest of town with a pretty postcard view of the charter-flight Sodom below. It was marked Monte Stefano on my old Italian map and is called Mount Smith on newer ones, re-named after the British admiral Sidney Smith, whose fleet transported the Ottoman troops to their defeat at Aboukir.

I scaled up Smith's hill. Still freshly green, each step through the shrubbery released a tinge of thyme and hyssop. I took in the grand view and shared the feelings of the poet Lamartine, who made a stopover here in 1835, like myself en route from Judea, whose barren rock-heaps and wretched population had disheartened him greatly:

Outside the gates of Jerusalem we really didn't see a living thing, we encountered the same silence which we would have expected in Pompey or Herculaneum ... a total, eternal silence prevails in towns, along the roads, in the countryside ... the grave of an entire people.

But the springtime glory of forest-clad Rhodes made a voluptuous impression on the loveable romantic, and he showered it with praise. Here, it seems, unlike in Judea, Turk and native alike held trees in the highest esteem. Plane-trees were planted for coolness, shade and soil-protection and woe to anyone maiming living trees for firewood. Lamartine reports that a Greek, caught cutting a branch off a venerable old plane, was given a cane-hiding by the vali's commissar. Some decades after Lamartine s visit, however, the Ottoman rail system was launched. It spanned a vast area, from the Danube to the Persian Gulf and from the Caucasus to Sinai. The craving for wooden sleepers took a brutal toll on forests all over the Empire. The Rhodian pine forests of today are almost all Italian reforestation projects.

Where I stood now, on a hillside crisscrossed by goat trails, with budding apricots like cerise dabs in the valley below and busy warblers darting in and out of the thickets, I could only assent with Lamartine's raving homage to Rhodes and its vegetation. There was no one about, except an old goatherd with a bristle of a moustache and a parched, outdoor face, leaning on his staff some terraces below mine. His charges, a handful of huge rams, rummaged through the shrubland of mastic and pink cliff roses – the local subspecies Cistus creticus is the source of laudanum, an aromatic gum related to opium, used in perfumes and folk drugs, and was harvested by a condominium of Rhodian synagogues in the 17th century.

The slope was powdered with yellow anemones. I took special notice of them since they are not found in the Holy Land. The goats didn't touch them. The herdsman wore the rag of a brigand around his head and baggy pantaloons...