The island of Rhodes is just off of the coast of Turkey,
but it belongs to Greece, and before that, it spent 35 years as an Italian colony.
Italy, first as a fragile democracy and then under Benito Mussolini, would justify its 20th-century
rule on Rhodes by emphasising very specific parts of Rhodes’ past and erasing others.
The Italians invested enormously in transforming the island into a model—
first of more traditional European imperialism, and then of Fascist sensibilities—but, why?
Why did Italy take Rhodes, and how does the island’s colonial history show some differences,
and similarities, between those two antiquated ideals?
Well Italy, which had only united in the 1860s, had to start from behind in the imperial game.
But ‘Empire’ was all the rage, and they were eager to prove themselves just as important a power as
the likes of Britain and France. Their rather small concessions in the Horn of Africa just
weren’t up to snuff—Belgium had a more important empire than Italy. So, when in 1912 the Italians
successfully seized the Dodecanese Islands—Rhodes being the largest—in a war fought against the
Ottoman Empire over Libya, the opportunity to keep another territory was too good to pass up.
By Italian Unification,
most of Africa and Asia were already in some way subject to European powers.
That left Italy looking for conquests closer to home.
So, in addition to prestige, part of the reasoning
for keeping Rhodes and the Dodecanese was strategic.
The islands helped Italy to counter Britain’s influence in the Mediterranean
and a natural harbour on the island of Leros made for an excellent naval base.
The Dodecanese chain also made for a good Italian bargaining chip against Greece as
the two competed for influence in Albania and fought on the island of Corfu in the early 1920s.
Later Italy would use the Dodecanese as a staging ground for greater expansion against the Greeks.
Aside from strategic importance though, what actually was happening on Rhodes
under Italian administration was nothing less than a massive socio-cultural project.
Both in the eyes of Liberal Italy and then the Fascists, the Dodecanese had centuries of
Italian connections to be exploited—through from Rome, to the Crusades, to Venetian mercantilism.
But how the Italian authorities used that history changed drastically over time.
Between the annexation of the Dodecanese and 1936 (mostly under Governor Mario Lago),
Rhodes was turned into a tourism Mecca and an imperial display piece. Visitors from
all over Europe flocked to the island and its eponymous capital, encouraged by lavish Italian
spending on public works projects all over the mediaeval city. Most notably the renovation
of the Palace of the Grandmaster, once the headquarters of the Crusader Knights of Rhodes.
The plan for the Rhodians—mostly ethnic Greeks—was soft assimilation.
In practice, that meant suppressing Greece’s historic connection to the islands.
The thousand years or so that the Greek Byzantine
or Eastern Roman Empire ruled Rhodes was to be downplayed,
while the older Roman period, Catholic Crusaders, mediaeval Italian traders,
and even the Turkish Ottomans who ruled Rhodes before the Italians
were all categorised as ‘Mediterranean’ and promoted as an alternative to Greek identity.
The idea was that the (European) peoples of the Mediterranean had common heritage and that common
‘Mediterranean-ness’ should be fostered under Italian guidance. The real goal was to keep
Greek nationalism under control, and in that, the Italians were fairly successful. At the same time,
several thousand Italian colonists were transplanted to the Dodecanese.
As for Rhodes’ minorities: Turks from the Ottoman period, as well as Jews (many with
ancestors who had fled the Spanish Inquisition) their architecture was embraced (particularly old
Ottoman styles) but the people were confined to their historic quarters of the city.
In the name of historical preservation, plenty of Jews and Turks had their property seized.
Visiting their city quarters, and those of the Greeks, and gawking at the daily
lives of the ‘exotic’ inhabitants, was a key part of government-sponsored historic tours.
Quite plainly, it said: “Look at the quaint lives of the natives,
and see how generous we are to preserve their culture.”
Benito Mussolini became Prime Minister of Italy in 1922, but Italian policy on
Rhodes was left distinctly imperial until the mid-nineteen thirties.
Italian Fascism developed as Mussolini and the
Fascist Party consolidated their hold on the country.
In the twenties, the regime’s ideology wasn’t yet quite akin to, say,
Hitler’s Germany; the turning point was Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
With Mussolini’s expansionist dreams now becoming a reality, the emboldened
Duce did away with ‘Mediterranean-ness’ in favour of supremacist Italian nationalism.
Mussolini was never as race-obsessed as his German counterpart, but he certainly
wanted his empire in the east to be purely Italian in character. A new governor was
sent to the Dodecanese in 1936. Cesare de Vecchi was a Fascist through and through,
and the forced Italianisation of Rhodes became his top priority.
No longer would local traditions be even paternalistically accepted.
The change was so seismic that buildings put up by the Italians themselves in the
twenties were totally transformed under de Vecchi in the 1930s. The teaching of
Italian became mandatory, and native languages were prohibited in public life. Anti-Semitism,
which had been close to not a thing in the early Fascist movement, spiked.
Italy’s Race Laws of 1938 denied civil rights to Jews all across the Italian Empire.
To an extent, that was to curry favour with quintessentially Jew-hating Nazi Germany.
For their part, the Germans always looked down on Italy—seeing them as
racially inferior—and while the two did occupy Greece in 1941,
Hitler pressured Mussolini to put on hold Italian colonisation of more Aegean Islands.
When Mussolini was deposed and Italy switched to the Allied side,
Hitler set him up as a puppet in northern Italy.
That put an end to any notion of an Italian Aegean,
and from 1943 until the end of the war, the Germans effectively controlled the Dodecanese.
The Greeks and Turks survived, but the Germans virtually wiped out Rhodes’ Jewish community.
After the defeat of the Axis, Britain took temporary control of Rhodes,
before a reformed Italy officially ceded the Dodecanese to Greece.
Germany overran Rhodes after Mussolini was ousted by his own Grand Council in 1943, but when he came
to power he was seen by many (including plenty of non-Fascists) as a defender of Italy. To find
out how he could paint that picture, you should check out the video on Italy’s fall to Fascism
to the left. And as always, I’ve been James and thanks for watching Look Back History.