Rhodes Riots

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In Athens last week Greek newsboys pattering down the streets brought news to cause swarthy citizens to choke over their sweet coffee and baklava. In flaring headlines the newspaper Hestia claimed that during a riotous local election Italian carabinieri had swept down on the little village of Salacos on the Island of Rhodes firing volleys into the unarmed villagers. Planes from the Italian base on Leros had bombed the town. Ten were killed, at least 30 wounded.

Confusing to the untraveled are the myriad land dots in the eastern Mediterranean, which loosely make up the Isles of Greece. Three of the largest are of current political interest. Far west, due south of Italian Sicily is the Island of Malta which revolted against Napoleon in 1798 and was voluntarily annexed to Britain by the Treaty of Paris (1814). Here the Knights of Malta established a hospital, a fortress, and the medieval forerunner of the Red Cross after the Crusades. Here the British Government has had much trouble in recent years with a population largely Italian and predominantly Roman Catholic. (TIME, May 19, 1930 et seq.).

Banana-shaped Crete, in the centre, belongs to Greece. There in prehistoric times lived the Minotaur and there men fashioned golden goblets of great beauty and invented the water closet. On Crete at present is the summer home and strategic retreat of Eleutherios Venizelos, sly Grand Old Man of Greek politics.

Rhodes and 13 other islands nestling against the Turkish coast have been acknowledged Italian territory since the Lausanne Conference of 1923, exactly 400 years after Turkey captured Rhodes from the Knights of St. John, whose survivors became the Knights of Malta. Though Italy seized them from Turkey by force of arms, it had nothing whatever to do with the World War. The islands were prize booty from the half-forgotten Turkish-Italian War of 1912.

No one knows just where the Colossus of Rhodes stood, that great bronze statue once spanning the harbor mouth which was one of Philo of Byzantium's Seven Wonders of the World. It was built by Charles of Lindus in 280 B. c., crashed in an earthquake 56 years later. For 880 years bronze fragments of it littered the harbor of Rhodes. Finally in 656 A. D. the tidy Saracens after capturing the island sold the remnants to a junk dealer, who carted them away on 900 camels.

Like Malta, Rhodes was fortified and held by Crusaders. Paralleling Britain's troubles with Malta's Italian population are Italy's troubles with the Rhodians, two-thirds of whom are Greeks, most of the rest Turks.

Not satisfied with the anti-Fascist riots and the "Massacre of Salacos," Greek newspapers last week had an even more startling story to follow it. The Greek Orthodox Church has in its guardianship the third of three temples of which all Christendom is jealous: the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and the Monastery of St. John in Patmos, one of the northernmost of the Dodecanese Islands.* On Patmos John is supposed to have hidden in a cave and received the vision of the Apocalypse (''The Book of Revelation''). The monastery on the site was built there by St. Christodulus in the 11th Century. The Dodecanesian Society in Athens last week insisted that Italian carabinieri had seized this monastery, possibly with a view to turning it over to the Church of Rome.

* The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is actually in custody of a Moslem family, but six Christian sects maintain and hold services in it: Greek Orthodox, Latin, Armenian, Coptic, Jacobite and Abyssinian. The Church of the Nativity is surrounded by convents of Greek, Latin and Armenian Churches, whose disputes over the rights to the sanctuary have been going on for centuries.

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