The Dodecanese: Further Travels Among the Insular Greeks

A sequel to The Cyclades, a compilation of late-19th-century travel writings (with an archaeological/ethnographical bias) centred on the Greek Dodecanese islands (including Rhodes, Nissiros, Tilos, Karpathos, Patmos, and Astypalea). The authors are the British explorer J. Theodore Bent (1852-1897), devotedly supported by his wife Mabel Virginia Anna (1847-1929). Theodore met Mabel shortly after coming down from Oxford in 1875 and they married two years later. They were of independent character and means and spent the too few years until Theodore’s early death on a breathless sequence of annual travels to the Eastern Mediterranean, Africa, and Southern Arabia. Theodore’s publications are referenced still by archaeologists and scholars working on sites or regions such as ‘Great Zimbabwe’, Aksum, the Wadi Hadramaut, the Cilician littoral, and, of course, the Greek islands. Bent’s first successful monograph was based on two winters spent in the Cycladic isles (1882/3 and 1883/4). From the start the couple kept notebooks from which all Theodore’s later lectures and literature sprang. His The Cyclades, or Life Among the Insular Greeks was published in 1885 and has been rarely out of print since. It remains one of the most delightful accounts in English of the region, and few serious travellers and tourists to these islands fail to discover it. In the year The Cyclades was published the Bents moved a little east and explored the islands now commonly referred to as the Greek Dodecanese. Unforeseen circumstances obliged the explorers to curtail their activities before Theodore’s writings on the area could be edited into a monograph to complement his earlier bestseller. Theodore’s Dodecanesian output was channelled instead into a wide range of articles, while Mabel completed three volumes of her personal Chronicles on their daily travels and travails. Bent never presented his Dodecanese researches to the public in a compendium, the way he had, so brilliantly, for the Cyclades. Now, 130 years later, his The Dodecanese can appear for the first time: a collection of reminiscences and studies on these sunny, blue-surrounded, and delightful islands.