Ham-fisted in Rhodes

- 1 August 1988

FROM OUR ATHENS CORRESPONDENT

Rhodes, which gave the classical Greek world one of its seven wonders, also gave it Cleobulus, one of the seven wise men. The recent search for the lost 100-foot bronze Colossus, prompted by the visions of an Australian clairvoyante, revealed nothing except, perhaps, that there is little wisdom left on the island.

The Colossus, put up at the height of Rhodes’s prosperity early in the third century BC, portrayed, suitably enough, the sun god Helios. Rhodes is still sunny, but no longer as prosperous as its hoteliers would like. Rich tourists pass Rhodes by, they complain, because the island has become a package-holiday resort. Searching for the Colossus, they thought, would restore a touch of class.

Where did the idea come from? A local travel agent had brought to Rhodes Mrs Ann Dankbaar, an Australian clairvoyante born in Holland. She claimed she could “see” the Colossus lying 700 yards outside the harbour in deepish water. Greece’s merchant navy minister, Mr Stathis Alexandris, keen to help depressed island economies, supported Mrs Dankbaar’s theories. A search began.

Excitement ensued when a one-tonne hunk of light brown limestone was hauled off the seabed and placed under armed guard. This was a giant fist, officials said: its grooves marked the fingers of a left hand that had once held a torch.

In the thrill of discovery, awkward details were overlooked: the presumed fist was of limestone, not bronze; the stone had no incrustations after supposedly lying on the seabed for 2,200 years; and, according to Pliny, who claimed to have seen the fallen Colossus, the limbs of the statue were hollow.

Eager for credit, and in apparent disregard of due Greek procedure for handling antiquities, Mr Alexandris kept archaeologists from the ministry of culture at bay until coast-guard frogmen had hauled the stone to land and he had held his news conference. To confuse matters, he said the frogmen had stumbled on the stone while searching for narcotics hidden in submerged car tyres.

At this point, Miss Melina Mercouri, the minister of culture, who is responsible for monitoring archaeological research in Greece, decided to step in. With archaeologists in tow, she flew to Rhodes on July 7th. One look at the find was enough for the experts to pronounce it “an ordinary rock”. The grooves on the stone fitted exactly the teeth of the grab-bucket on a floating dredger that had cleared the harbour of Rhodes three years ago and dumped unwanted blocks of limestone into the open sea.

As tactfully as she could, Miss Mercouri said: “Unfortunately, this is not the Colossus. I wish it were. But we must tell the truth even if it hurts.” This is what happens, she bluntly added, if archaeological research is not left to archaeologists. “We cannot”, she said, “rely on fortunetellers.”

As a sop to the disappointed people of Rhodes, Miss Mercouri said that the department of underwater antiquities would soon be mapping all the antiquities strewn along Rhodes’s coastline. These include an ancient wreck off Lindos, on Rhodes’s eastern coast, near where, according to early Christian tradition, Saint Paul was shipwrecked on his way to Rome.