Dodecanese
The Dodecanese are a group of 15 larger and 150 smaller Greek islands in the southeastern Aegean Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, off the coast of Anatolia, of which 26 are inhabited. This island group generally defines the eastern limit of the Sea of Crete. They belong to the wider Southern Sporades island group.
Rhodes has been the area's dominant island since antiquity. Of the others, Kos and Patmos are historically the most important; the remaining 12 are Agathonisi, Astypalaia, Halki, Kalymnos, Karpathos, Kasos, Leipsoi, Leros, Nisyros, Symi, Tilos, and Megisti. Other islands in the chain include Alimia, Arkoi, Farmakonisi, Gyali, Kinaros, Levitha, Marathos, Nimos, Pserimos, Saria, Strongyli and Syrna.
Name
The name "Dodecanese", meaning "The Twelve Islands" denotes today an island group in the southeastern Aegean Sea, comprising 15 major islands and 93 smaller islets. Since Antiquity, these islands formed part of the group known as the "Southern Sporades".The name first appears in Byzantine-period sources in the 8th century, as a naval command under a, encompassing the southern Aegean Sea, which eventually evolved into the Theme of Samos. It was not applied to the current island group, but to the 12 Cyclades islands clustered around Delos. The name may indeed be of a far earlier date, and modern historians suggest that the 12 islands Strabo mentions were the origin of the term. The term remained in use throughout the medieval period and was still used for the Cyclades in both colloquial usage and scholarly Greek-language literature until the 18th century.
The transfer of the name to the present-day Dodecanese has its roots in the Ottoman period. Upon the Ottoman conquest of the islands held by the Knights Hospitaller in 1522, the two larger islands, Rhodes and Kos, came under direct Ottoman rule, while the others, of which the 12 main islands were usually named, enjoyed extensive privileges pertaining to taxation and self-government. Concerted attempts to abolish these privileges were made after 1869, as the Ottoman Empire attempted to modernize and centralize its administrative structure, and the last vestiges of the old privileges were finally abolished after the Young Turks took power in 1908. It was at that time that the press in the independent Kingdom of Greece began referring to the 12 privileged islands, in the context of their attempts to preserve their privileges, collectively as the "Dodecanese". Shortly afterward, in 1912, most of the Southern Sporades were captured by the Italians in the Italo-Turkish War, except for Ikaria, which joined Greece in 1912 during the First Balkan War, and Kastellorizo, which came under Italian rule only in 1921. The place of the latter two was taken by Kos and Rhodes, bringing the number of the major islands under Italian rule back to 12. Thus, when the Greek press began agitating for the cession of the islands to Greece in 1913, the term used was still the "Dodecanese". The Italian occupation authorities helped establish the term when they named the islands under their control "Rhodes and the Dodecanese", adding Leipsoi to the list of the major islands to make up for considering Rhodes separately.
By 1920, the name had become firmly established for the entire island group, as acknowledged by the Italian government when it appointed the islands' first civilian governor, Count, as "Viceroy of the Dodecanese". As the name was associated with Greek irredentism, from 1924 Mussolini's Fascist regime tried to abolish its use by calling them the "Italian Islands of the Aegean", but this name never acquired any currency outside Italian administrative usage. The islands joined Greece in 1947 following as the "Governorate-General of the Dodecanese", after 1955 the "Dodecanese Prefecture".
Geography
The Dodecanese are in the South East Aegean sea and are bordered by Turkey in the East, Crete in the southwest and the Cyclades in the west.Climate
Most of the Dodecanese have a hot-summer Mediterranean climate while Karpathos, Kasos and Nisyros have a hot semi-arid climate with mild winters and hot summers. Rhodes Port, Kasos, Karpathos and Kastellorizo record among the mildest winters in Europe. South East Rhodes experiences a significantly warmer climate with Lindos registering a mean annual temperature of around, making it the warmest area in Greece. Moreover, according to the Hellenic National Meteorological Service, South East Rhodes records the highest mean annual sunshine in Greece with over 3,100 hours.History
Pre-history and the Archaic period
The Dodecanese have been inhabited since prehistoric times. In the Neopalatial period on Crete, the islands were heavily Minoanized. Following the downfall of the Minoans, the islands were ruled by the Mycenaean Greeks from circa 1400 BC, until the arrival of the Dorians circa 1100 BC. It is in the Dorian period that they began to prosper as an independent entity, developing a thriving economy and culture through the following centuries. By the early Archaic period Rhodes and Kos emerged as the major islands in the group, and in the 6th century BC the Dorians founded three major cities on Rhodes. Together with the island of Kos and the cities of Knidos and Halicarnassos on the mainland of Asia Minor, these made up the Dorian Hexapolis.Classical period
This development was interrupted around 499 BC by the Persian Wars, during which the islands were captured by the Persians for a brief period. After the Athenians defeated the Persians in 478 BC, the cities joined the Athenian-dominated Delian League. When the Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 BC, they remained largely neutral, though they were still members of the League.By the time the Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BC, the Dodecanese were mostly removed from the larger Aegean conflicts, and had begun a period of relative quiet and prosperity. In 408 BC, the three cities of Rhodes had united to form one state, which built a new capital on the northern end of the island, also named Rhodes; this united Rhodes dominated the region for the coming millennia. Other islands in the Dodecanese also developed into significant economic and cultural centers; most notably, Kos served as the site of the school of medicine founded by Hippocrates.
The Peloponnesian War had so weakened the entire Greek civilization's military strength that it lay open to invasion. In 357 BC, the islands were conquered by King Mausolus of Caria, then in 340 BC by the Persians. But this second period of Persian rule proved nearly as short as the first, and the islands became part of the rapidly growing Macedonian Empire as Alexander the Great swept through and defeated the Persians in 332 BC, to the great relief of the islands' inhabitants.
After Alexander's death, the islands, and even Rhodes itself, were split up among the many generals who contended to succeed him. The islands formed strong commercial ties with the Ptolemies in Egypt, and together they formed the Rhodo-Egyptian alliance, which controlled trade throughout the Aegean in the 3rd century BC. Led by Rhodes, the islands developed into maritime, commercial and cultural centers: coins of Rhodes circulated almost everywhere in the Mediterranean, and the islands' schools of philosophy, literature and rhetoric were famous. The Colossus of Rhodes, built in 304 BC, perhaps best symbolized their wealth and power.
In 164 BC, Rhodes signed a treaty with Rome, and the islands became aligned to greater or lesser extent with the Roman Republic while mostly maintaining their autonomy. Rhodes quickly became a major schooling center for Roman noble families, and, as the islands were important allies of Rome, they enjoyed numerous privileges and generally friendly relations. These were eventually lost in 42 BC, in the turmoil following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, after which Cassius invaded and sacked the islands. Thereafter, they became part of the Roman Empire proper. Titus made Rhodes capital of the Provincia Insularum, and eventually the islands were joined with Crete as part of the 18th Province of the Roman Empire.
In the 1st century, Saint Paul visited the islands twice, and Saint John visited numerous times; they succeeded in converting the islands to Christianity, placing them among the first dominantly Christian regions. Saint John eventually came to reside among them, being exiled to Patmos, where he wrote his famous Revelation.
Middle Ages
As the Roman Empire split in AD 395 into Eastern and Western halves, the islands became part of the Eastern part, which later evolved into the Byzantine Empire. They would remain there for nearly a thousand years, though these were punctuated by numerous invasions. It was during this period that they began to reemerge as an independent entity, and the term Dodecanese itself dates to around the 8th century. Copious evidence of the Eastern Roman period remains on the islands today, most notably in hundreds of churches from the period in various states of preservation.In the 10th and 11th centuries, on behalf the Roman Empire of Constantinople, the area was controlled and secured with trade duty rights by powerful maritime city-state fleets of Genoa and Venice ; When the Genoese snatched a treaty from the Paleologos Emperors of Constantinople, they began invading portions of the Dodecanese and other eastern isles from Chios to Rhodes that had remained under the nominal power of the Empire of Nicea; Genoese family clans each held some islands and were granted rights to rule, trade and to exploit raw materials, in exchange for maritime protection, while Orthodox monks ruled on Patmos and Leros. The Byzantine era came to an end when the islands were rented and sold by Genoeses for the venue of the Knights Hospitaller : Rhodes was reinforced in 1309, and in the rest of the islands the Knights gradually built castles and fortress over the next few decades, while the Genoese fleet remained in charge of the sea routes and kept its bases and trading stores. The Knights made Rhodes their stronghold, transforming its capital into a grandiose medieval city dominated by an impressive fortress, with scattered other fortresses and citadels throughout the rest of the islands.
These massive fortifications proved sufficient to repel invasions by the Sultan of Egypt in 1444 and Mehmed II in 1480. Finally, the citadel at Rhodes fell to the army of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522, and the other islands were overrun within the year. The few remaining Knights fled to Malta.