Lindos: Bay by Bay
Around AD 51, on Paul’s third missionary journey, Paul stopped briefly in Rhodes.
Ὡς δὲ ἐγένετο ἀναχθῆναι ἡμᾶς ἀποσπασθέντας ἀπʼ αὐτῶν, εὐθυδρομήσαντες ἤλθομεν εἰς τὴν Κῶ, τῇ δὲ ἑξῆς εἰς τὴν Ῥόδον, κἀκεῖθεν εἰς Πάταρα. καὶ εὑρόντες πλοῖον διαπερῶν εἰς Φοινίκην ἐπιβάντες ἀνήχθημεν.
When we had parted from them [the Ephesian elders at Miletus] and had set sail, we ran a straight course to Cos and the next day to Rhodes and from there to Patara; and having found a ship crossing over to Phoenicia, we went aboard and set sail. — Acts 21.1-21.2)
We went to Rhodes! While we spent most of our time in the tiny village of Embonas, we ended our time on the island with a couple of days in Lindos and a couple in Rhodes City. Either one of these places might have been where Paul’s ship put in.
Bay 1: Rhodes
Rhodes (city), is the eponymous capital city of Rhodes (island). It is on the north point of the island, has a spacious harbor facing the city of Patara in Lycia, Paul’s next stop on his trip. What you see today if you walk around the Old City is mostly Byzantine and Ottoman stuff… it is hard to see what it might have been like when Paul went there. The one thing we share with Paul is that we all missed seeing the Colossus standing astride the harbor, although Paul might have seen some of the remnants that survived the earthquake of 226 BC. The harbors of Rhodes are very busy.
Bay 2: Lindos
Paul’s ship might have stopped in Lindos, on the eastern side of the island. Lindos is now a huge tourist attraction of the worst sort, quite frankly—lots of aggressively advertised nightclubs aimed at teenagers dragged by their parents on a cultural tour of Greece. By night, Lindos vibrates with That Thumpin’ Bass™ and glows with neon. But there is a cool fortress overlooking the town, and several lovely bays on either side of the town. One of them is “Saint Paul’s Bay”, a small, well-protected anchorage that the locals claim was where Paul stopped.
Bay 3: Anthony Quinn
The people of Rhodes are happy to give advice to travellers, and while a few folks recommended Saint Paul’s Bay, everyone recommended a bay named for the de facto patron saint of Rhodes: Anthony Quinn. Quinn was born Manuel Antonio Rodolfo Quinn Oaxaca in Chihuahua, Mexico; his mother was Mexican and his father was Irish, an immigrant from County Cork. He was in about a million movies in the mid-20th Century, often cast as a character from the Mediterranean (Ulysses), Central Asia (Attila), or the Middle-East (the Bedouin Omar Mukhtar).
In 1961 he was in The Guns of Navarone, with Gregory Peck and Irene Papas. The story is a WWII adventure set on a fictional Greek island but filmed on Rhodes. The production was the best thing that ever happened to Rhodes, to hear the locals talk about it. It put Rhodes on the map, and brought a lot of money into the local economy. And while Irene Papas was the only Greek actor in the movie, Quinn (who plays a Cretan resistance fighter) basically became an honorary Greek. He locked down that status by playing another Greek guy in Zorba the Greek three years later.
One of the scenes in The Guns of Navarone was filmed in a little bay north of Lindos. Quinn wanted to buy it and make it into a resort, and although bureaucracy thwarted his benevolent plan, the place is still called “Quinn’s Bay” after this latter-day saint of the island of Rhodes. We didn’t go there; the picture below is from the Internet.
