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From  Chania On The Island Of Crete I wandered over to the island of Rhodes. The town of Rhodes was of course the headquarters of the   Knights Hospitaller from 1309 to 1522, when they were displaced by the Ottoman Turks under Suleiman the Magnificent .  Crete at the bottom of the map. Rhodes is the easternmost of the white (Greek) islands, with the town of Rhodes at the northern end (click on images for enlargements). The old town is essentially the part of the town lying inside the mammoth walls built by the  Knights Hospitaller . The modern town of Rhodes lies outside the old city walls.  Modern city to the north and south of Rhodes Old Town, shown here in dark yellow  Old Town of Rhodes showing the Hospitaller walls in brown. Main street of the Rhodes Old Town. Rhodes is primarily a summer resort. In the winter most of the stores and restaurants serving tourists are closed and the town is very quiet.  Same street in summertime; obviously a di...

From Venice I flew to Athens and then wandered on down to the island of Crete. As most of you know, Crete was once part of the Byzantine Empire. Following the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 by Crusaders and Venetians led by Enrico Dandolo the island became part of  La Serenissima, the Serene Republic of Venice. It remained part of La Serenissima until 1669 when the Ottoman Turks took over. In 1908, when the Ottoman Empire was on the ropes, indigenous Cretans decided to became part of Greece. The city of Chania on the island has an Old Town dating largely to the Venetian Era and I was of course eager to see it. (Chania, as I was informed several times during my first hour in town, is pronounced xan-Ye . Crete, the island at the bottom of the map, is 175 miles south of Athens. Chania is at the northwest corner of the island (map courtesy of nationsonline ). Port of Chania (click on image for enlargements) Downtown Chania My hotel in the old Venetian quarter of town. The original b...

After visiting Nusaybin and the Church of St. Jacob on the Turkish-Syrian border we stopped at one of the famous fish restaurants on the Beyazsu (White Water) River north of  the city. Most of the restaurants on the Beyazu grow their own trout in water tanks fed by the  Beyazsu River (click on image for enlargements). Trout in the tanks. After you order they are netted and prepared for the table. Most of the restaurants feature river-side dining. River-side tables River-side tables River-side table where we dined You might think this place was just for show and that the food would be an afterthought, but not so. This was one of the better restaurant meals I have had in years. Actually we ordered the Kurdish equivalent of Surf-n-Turf. The lamb kabobs are not shown here.

Back in the Spring of 2014 I visited Nusaybin On The Turkish-Syrian Border .  Nusaybin is the modern Turkish name of the city. Most of the residents of the city , however, are either Kur ds, S yri acs (also k nown as C haldeans, A ssyrians, or Arameans ,  not to be confused with Syrians ) or Ar abs. The K ur dish name fo r t he cit y i s Nisêbîn . During Roman and Byzantine times the city was known as  Nisibis . I was in town to visit the Church of St. Jacob and the ruins of the old  School of Nisibis , which local boosters and  Others  try to claim was the world’s first university. It might well have been the first university in what is now Turkey. It was founded by St. Jacob in the first half of the fourth century A.D. Jacob (d. 338) had been appointed bishop of the Christian community of Nisibis in 309. In addition to founding the university, he also, according to local sources, built the church which still stands near the ruins of the School of Nisib...

By the 1070s both the Byzantine Empire and the Venetian Republic were threatened by the rapacious Normans from western Europe. The Normans were descendants of pirates, freebooters, and marauders from Iceland, Denmark, and the western Scandinavian Peninsula who by the tenth century had settled in the part of northern France that now bears their name—Normandy. Ambitious, foot-loose, and militaristic, they quickly moved east and by 1017 had established footholds in southern Italy. They soon controlled most of the southern half  of the Italian Peninsula and by 1072 had seized Sicily. Their leader Robert de Hauteville, known better known as Robert Guiscard (“the Crafty”) then set his sights on the Golden Apple, Constantinople, the ultimate prize of a long string of marauders dating back to Alaric the Goth and Attila the Hun. His plan was to proceed from the Norman strongholds on the boot heel of Italy across the Strait of Otranto to the coastline of the Balkans and seize the city of Dur...

Despite of the claims of  Joseph Farrell , the Dandolos do not appear to have been descended from Mesopotamian slaves. Later, when they were one of the most prominent families in Venice, the Dandolos would promote the notion that their ancestors were among the leaders of the the refugees who had fled the depredations of the Goths and the Huns in the fifth century and that thus they were one of the founding families of Venice. This was a common claim among the families of Venice who wanted to assert that they did indeed belong to the aristocracy, much like Americans who place great stock in the claim that their ancestors come to the New World on the Mayflower and landed at Plymouth Rock. According to the legend favored by the Dandolos themselves, they were prominent citizens of Padua before moving to the islands in the Venetian Lagoon, where they took their rightful place among the Rialto elite. The truth is less clear. There is no mention of them at all in the earliest histories of...

According to tradition, the city of Venus was founded at the stroke of noon on Friday, March 25, a. d. 421. On the Catholic calendar it was the Feast of the Annunciation, celebrating the day when the angel Gabriel announced to the Virgin Mary that she would be the mother of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The story goes that around this time three Roman consuls from the city of Padua on the mainland came to a group of islands two miles from the coast known as  the Rivoalto ,  or “high bank”. On slighter higher ground on both sides of a deep channel running through the area settlers from the mainland had established a small community. The area where they settled became known as the Rialto, a corruption of rivoalto , and adjacent channel was eventually transmogrified into the Grand Canal. The three consuls had supposedly come to the Rialto to set up a trading post and found a church dedicated to St. Giacomo (James), thus sanctioning the small settlement.  A church of St. Giac...

To the west Campo Santa Maria del Giglio opens unto a smaller square known as Campiello Feltrina. From here Calle Zaguri crosses a canal known Rio de S. M. Zobenigo.  The bridge over the canal, the Ponte de la Feltrina, is one of 435 bridges in Venice (including the island of Guidecca, south of the six districts name earlier) that cross the city’s 182 named canals. It is also considered to be of the more picturesque. I know this because I hear a tour group leader pointing it out to her ten or so charges. On the other side of the bridge is a Chinese tour group of some fifteen people led by a women carrying a long stick topped by a yellow flag that she frantically waves to assemble her wandering troops. Young Chinese women on the bridge itself pose in varying degrees of allure for photos while others jockey for positions from which to take selfies. Attracted to this site by the tourists are four beggars, two on each end of the bridge. Two are decrepit old men, obviously locals, with...