On the Greek island of Rhodes, I skipped the beach to visit a pasha's library

On the Greek island of Rhodes, I skipped the beach to visit a pasha's library Submitted by Sean Mathews on Tue, 05/12/2026 - 10:09 Nestled in the back streets of Rhodes is an Ottoman library administered by the same family for seven generations The book room of the Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library on the island of Rhodes, Greece, is pictured on 4 April 2026 (Sean Mathews/MEE) Off "I'd be doing this even if you weren't here," Tarik Tuten, a local resident, tells me. "I walk for hours on Rhodes. It's my habit," he adds, as his polite, Turkish-accented English cuts through the quiet alley paved in sea pebbles. It's early spring, and the tourists have yet to fully descend on Rhodes. Besides the stray cats, we are alone. The sky is leaden and there is just a faint pit-pat of rain. But we are protected overhead by sachnisi, those jutting, second-storey windows that whisper Levantine refinement; dormant bougainvillaeas slither up to the wooden shutters like the coils of a hookah. At this time of year, Rhodes' back alleys have a whiff of huzun, that delectable melancholy which haunts Orhan Pamuk’s novels and seems to go with decaying Levantine cities like ouzo and meze. Huzun is a precious commodity in today's eastern Mediterranean, divided as it is between coastlines turned into war zones or soaking up the wealth of the footloose rich. Neither war nor Dubaisation leaves much space for huzun. Tuten knows these alleys like the back of his hand. One minute, he is guiding me through untended gardens in the old Jewish quarter. Next, he is pointing out a Byzantine church hidden behind oleanders and cypresses. But I have come to Rhodes, the most southeastern of Greece's Dodecanese islands, to be more than a flaneur. I am here to visit a library. One that dates back to 1793, to be precise, and to which my host, Tuten, is a seventh-generation trustee. The photo taken on 4 April 2026 shows the door of the Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library on the island of Rhodes and the minaret of the 16th-century Suleiman Mosque (Sean Mathews/MEE) Summer visitors to Rhodes could be forgiven for missing the Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library; protected by a nondescript wall, it sits across from the 16th-century Suleymaniye Mosque among a row of jewellery shops. But if you venture inside, you will find a bibliophilic cornucopia: 828 books on astrology, philosophy, medicine, Islamic law and economics, handwritten in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Persian. The library was founded by Tuten's ancestor as part of a waqf, or a pious charitable endowment. These trusts - both Christian and Muslim - once dotted the Ottoman Empire and can still be found in its former lands. But the library is rarer than the manuscripts inside of it because it is potentially the last waqf in the former Ottoman world still administered by its founding family.  "No other waqf like this, let alone a library, still exists under the original family's care. It's a miracle it survives," Tuten said. "We have good genes." The walking must help, I say to myself. The story of the Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library on Rhodes begins with a camel caravan to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, which Tuten's seventh-generation great-grandfather, Ahmed Aga of Rhodes, was leading on behalf of Sultan Selim III. Somewhere on that old pilgrimage route, likely between modern-day Syria and Saudi Arabia, Ahmed Aga was killed under murky circumstances. "My ancestor had acquired great wealth," Tuten recounted, as though the killing had happened half a century ago, still within living memory. "He was an Ottoman official, but also a Mediterranean merchant with a very diversified income. He had tax farms in the Balkans, a soap manufacturing facility in Izmir, shipping and salt mining interests. He probably made enemies and, when the grand vizier changed, he was assassinated. It was common for the grand vizier to consolidate support and eliminate potential rivals. We still don’t know the full story," he told me.  'A man of the Tanzimat era' The waqf that Ahmed Agha started was not expropriated by the state. It survived his death and reached new heights under his son, Ahmed Fethi Pasha, who would be better known to history than his father. Tarik Tuten, a seventh-generation trustee of the waqf, or pious trust, that administers the Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library, sits on the library's steps in a photograph taken on 4 April 2026 in Rhodes (Sean Mathews/MEE) Ahmed Fethi Pasha was born sometime between 1801 and 1802. The father's killing had no apparent hindrance on the son's rise through what was effectively the Ottoman deep-state. Ahmed entered the Imperial Ottoman army and served in the 1828-9 Russo-Turkish war. The conflict was Tsar Nicolas I's response to the Greek War of Independence, which was raging in the Peloponnese at the time. The Ottomans had lost their navy a year earlier in the Battle of Navarino against a joint French-British and Russian fleet. The tsar saw a perfect time to strike his historic rival under the auspices of defending Christians in the Ottoman Empire. The conflict resulted in sweeping territorial gains for the Russian Empire, but it also saw Ahmed's advancement. He performed well in battle and was bestowed the honorific fethi, meaning bravery.  Ahmed Fethi Pasha went on to serve as the Sultan's ambassador in Russia, Austria and France. Along the way, he acquired a taste for fine food (which Tuten tells me runs in the family), luxurious clothing and new technologies arising in the West. Ahmed Fethi founded the Beykoz porcelain factory in Istanbul, which met the Ottoman bourgeois’ rapacious appetite for western lifestyle items.  "Ahmed Fethi was very much a man of the Tanzimat era," Tuten tells me, referring to the 19th-century effort to modernise the Ottoman state by introducing western reforms in society, the military and bureaucracy. This penchant for western technology and urban planning culminated in a clock tower building boom that is still visible to travellers in the former Ottoman world, from Greece’s lesser-known islands to Lebanese mountain villages. The clock tower that Ahmed Fethi Pasha had built in 1852 in honour of Sultan Abdulmecid I’s visit to Rhodes dominates the old town’s skyline. "This was one of the earliest clock towers of the Tanzimat era," Tuten said. "Ahmed Fethi Pasha was ahead of his time".  'A holy duty' Yusuf, the ageing groundskeeper, pries open the big, wooden double doors to the library compound. We step back in time to an oasis.  The sweet scent of orange blossoms is dizzying. The courtyard floor ripples in bands of white and black pebbles like the waves of the sea - a mosaic technique found in Christian, Jewish and Muslim homes on Rhodes, called krokalia. Potted geraniums and basil - two or three rows deep - line the perimeter.  The courtyard is shaded by half a dozen loquat trees, whose branches droop with big clumps of orange plums.  Potted plants and citrus trees can be seen in the garden of the Hafız Ahmed Agha Library in Rhodes on 4 April 2026 (Sean Mathews/MEE) "The gardening is done by Yusuf's wife. We've kept it messy like this; we prefer it that way," Tuten says, clearly as proud of the architecture he is entrusted with as the valuable books inside.  The library is beautiful in its simplicity. It is constructed of Rhode's porous, sand-coloured limestone. The solemn, wooden windows are offset by delicate lintels. Peeking out to the sky is the red-doomed roof smothered in Khorasani, that strong, ancient mortar which continues to bind the architectural gems of Byzantine, Ottoman and Persian empires. This was a structure built to last generations - a repudiation of the sleek, synthetic constructions mushrooming in today’s Mediterranean, I thought to myself. Tuten nestles himself into a chair on the patio of Yusuf's house. The waqf's founding charter stipulated that a portion of its income, which is derived from property rents, should support a groundskeeper. Yusuf has had the job for 40 years. In that time, besides the rare visit to his village in the island's hinterland, he has never been more than two hours away from the library, Tuten tells me. "It’s like a holy duty for him. It's not about the salary," Tuten said.  Tuten has now receded into the background, while the library's resident researcher, Aydin Bostanci, takes over the tour. Aydin has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Islamic manuscripts. In addition to Turkish and Greek, he is fluent in Arabic and an expert on Ottoman calligraphy. He hails from Komotini, the capital of Greece's province of Western Thrace.  I tell Bostanci that Komotini is one of my favourite cities in Greece. Of all the places I have travelled in the Eastern Mediterranean, it is Greek Thrace that has best preserved the Ottoman millet system, which allowed for a careful coexistence between Muslim and Christian communities. Western Thrace and Istanbul were exempt from the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which ended the devastating Greco-Turkish War and mandated a population exchange between the two neighbours based on their respective religious majorities. But the Greek Christians of Istanbul and Muslim inhabitants of Western Thrace were exempt. While the Greek population of Istanbul is on the verge of extinction as a result of their forced expulsion in the 1960s, roughly a third of Western Thrace’s population comprises Muslim citizens of Greece, most of whom identify as Turkish.  Rhodes has its own local cosmopolitanism. The island is home to around 2,000 descendants of Muslim Ottoman citizens who avoided the 1923 population exchange because the Dodecanese islands were occupied by Italy from 1912 to 1947. Bostanci leads me past a whitewashed reading room of deeply recessed, arched windows and lofty cupolas. Old prints of Rhodes harbour and framed calligraphy decorate the walls. "The books were never allowed to leave the Library's premises," Bostanci explained. "Visitors would stay here and request a book from the librarian, who would bring it to them to read." The reading room of the Hafız Ahmed Agha Library in Rhodes is seen in this photo taken on 4 April 2026 (Sean Mathews/MEE) The number of residents who would have been literate in Ottoman, Persian and Arabic was small and limited to religious, civil and military officials, who were often transitory. Hence, the construction of a school, or medrese, on the waqf's premises, which educated young boys in Arabic and the Quran. Because the library is so well preserved, the grandeur and ritual that readers would have encountered when approaching its precious volumes two centuries ago still linger. Therefore, when Bostanci opens the door to the book room and beckons me in, I feel the small rush of adrenaline that comes with partaking in some forbidden act.  A glass-paned, cherry-wood shelf sits in the centre of the room. The books are stacked inside. I peruse the library's offerings, taking in the volumes with their battered bindings, and others with fine marbling.  The scent of old wood mixes with oud, the Middle Eastern fragrance which Bostanci tells me is tucked into the shelves to protect the books from bugs and bacteria. Soon, he is displaying the rarest volumes in front of me: A 1735 copy of Ibn Khaldun's 14th-century history of the world, The Muqaddimah; a Mamluk-era Quran; works on the Hadith and astronomy; and a beautiful 16th-century Safavid-style Quran. The book room of the Hafız Ahmed Agha Library, which smells of oud and cherry wood, displays its collection behind glass on 4 April 2026 (Sean Mathews/MEE) I think of the great journeys these volumes must have taken from Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad to arrive on this Ottoman island. Rhodes has always been a trampling ground for empires and a transit point for travellers. The Khedive, Chateaubriand and Durrell The old town is so enticing because it is a hodgepodge of Ottoman and crusader architecture. Rhodes was the last Levantine redoubt of the Knights Hospitaller after they were expelled from Jerusalem by the armies of Saladin. The knights captured Rhodes from the Byzantines by way of Cyprus in 1309 under the command of Grand Master Foulques de Villaret. They built ramparts, churches, hospitals and a great castle, which Italian dictator Benito Mussolini turned into his private, but never-used villa during the Italian occupation. The knights were not mere passersby. They left a remarkable architectural legacy behind that evokes the old city of Jerusalem. "Ahhh, only Rhodes compares to this city. There, we have our sea, whereas here, the desert calls," I remember one Greek priest in Jerusalem lamenting to me. It took the armies of no less a military genius than Suleiman the Magnificent six months in 1522 to oust the knights from the Catholics' last strategic outpost in the Levant. For comparison, Rhodes was conquered 70 years after the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, fell to the Ottomans.  But far from spelling the island's demise, with the Ottomans in control, Rhodes transitioned from being a fortress to an entrepot. The Ottomans made Rhodes their most important military and naval base in the Eastern Mediterranean, and shipbuilding and commerce flourished, particularly among Orthodox Christians and Jews. Rhodes was on the trade route linking North Africa and the Black Sea. It is easy to lament the overtourism of Rhodes, where overly buff waiters taunt customers into gaudy cafes with menus advertising everything from overpriced sushi to Greek taverna fare and pasta. But the truth is that the island was over-touristed before the word was invented. French writer Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand felt more at home on Rhodes than he did anywhere else in the Levant, no doubt because of the knights' legacy. "I found here a little France in the midst of Greece," he wrote in Travels in Greece, Palestine, Egypt, and Barbary (1812). Rare books stacked in the Hafız Ahmed Agha Library on 4 April 2026 (Sean Mathews/MEE) Some of the visitors to The Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library were likely members of Egypt's royal family, whose patriarch, Mohammed Ali Pasha, himself hailed from the modern-day Greek city of Kavala. Members of the Khedivate often vacationed on Rhodes to escape Egypt’s blistering summer heat. Bostanci told me that many of the Khedival elite, who were unfortunate enough to die on vacation, are buried at the Murad Reis Mosque near the port, which was reserved for the Ottoman-era ruling classes. I strolled there on my last day to find the Villa Cleobolus, which is the overly grand name that British writer Lawrence Durrell gave to the house of the cemetery's groundskeeper. It was Durrell's abode for the "two lucky years" he lived on the island. I wondered if Durrell, who washed ashore on Rhodes in 1945 from the Egyptian city of Alexandria, knew he was residing so close to the bones of that country's old royalty.  Before Durrell made the Egyptian port city's decaying decadence famous with The Alexandria Quartet, he penned Reflections on the Marine Venus about his time on Rhodes, setting the stage for Greece’s 1960s tourism boom.  On Rhodes, Durrell bathed in the Aegean and was cooled by the meltemi, "a Greco-Turkish hybrid" word for the strong, dry wind that engulfs the region; "cool on the forehead and breast, dispersing the afternoon accidie," or Levantine listlessness. Durrell’s Rhodes was a poor island in flux; no longer Ottoman or Italian, and not yet part of Greece. His neighbour, Mehmet Bey, was a Turkish black marketeer who used to kill chickens in his yard. Durrell recounts how the Rhodians had just discovered "white bread" from the British and "were positively snobbish about it". He worked as a press officer here, producing three daily papers - in Turkish, Italian and Greek - when the island was admired by the British government. He left an enduring summary of his coworkers. The Turks were "shy… and suspicious… [working] grain by grain", the Italians had a "feminine sense of decoration [and] desire to please" and the Greeks were the worst: "a terrible fellow… mercuric, noisy, voluble and proud".  A Mamluk-era Quran in the Hafız Ahmed Agha Library can be seen in this picture dated 4 April 2026 (Sean Mathews/MEE) On my last night, Tuten hosted me and a group of notables for dinner at an Italian restaurant in the new city. 'Muhabbet' "This feels like a Durrell novel," a Greek writer friend from Istanbul whispered to me. Indeed, this was the Levant at its finest. We were a motley crew from Istanbul, Saudi Arabia, Greece and Turkey. English was our common language, but side conversations echoed in Greek, Turkish and Arabic. The meal was lubricated by wine and delicious pizza. One of the guests was Savvas Pavlidis, a local researcher whose great-grandfather was the last Ottoman-era mayor of Rhodes. I asked him about the island and its absolute reliance on tourism. "This problem is decades old and has its roots on the unnatural disconnection of Rhodes, and other Greek islands, from the Asia Minor mainland," he told me. "This severed the economic links. The Italians were the first to recognise this when they came, so they invested in the tourism industry. The Greeks picked up where the Italians left off." Rhodes was always more connected to its eastern neighbourhood than the West. The last time it was properly in the spotlight was 1949, when representatives of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria gathered at the island's Italian-built casino to sign the 1949 Armistice Agreement with Israel, ending the Arab-Israeli war. The Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library is itself a testament to how Rhodes's geography and culture link it with the East. Tuten has arranged for a steady stream of researchers and academics to come study the library's rare manuscripts and learn about preservation. But at his core, as he pleasantly smiles at the diverse crowd mingling around him, I suspect what he wants is this. The Greeks and the Turks share an Arabic word for a cosy chat or exchange among friends, "muhabbet".  "I want the library to be a meeting place," he said. "A convivial space of muhabbet that unites." Heritage Rhodes News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19 Update Date Override 0