Conceived as an integral part of the BIP’s dialogical and collaborative framework, the excursion extends the exploration of dialogue across different places and situations.
Moving together from one setting to another, participants are invited to consider how encounters with different environments, histories,
and cultural forms may generate new conditions for observation, exchange, and collective attention.
Throughout the excursion, the guided visits form part of the BIP’s learning process rather than activities separate from it.
Dialogue develops in situ, through exchanges among students and teaching staff prompted by the places, objects, histories, and situations encountered along the way.
Observation, questioning, interpretation, and collective discussion thus accompany the visits themselves,
extending the BIP’s dialogical and collaborative learning process across different settings
(Introductory and “Within the BIP” texts: Prof. Elena Theodoropoulou)
The Medieval City of Rhodes
The Medieval City of Rhodes, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988, is a living historical settlement in which successive periods have left visible traces within the same urban fabric. Built upon the site of the ancient and Byzantine city, it was extensively transformed and fortified by the Knights of St John, who established themselves in Rhodes in 1309 and remained until the Ottoman conquest in 1522.
The fortified city developed around distinct but interconnected areas. The Upper Town, associated particularly with the Knights, includes the Palace of the Grand Masters, the Great Hospital, and the Street of the Knights, while elsewhere Gothic buildings coexist with mosques, baths, houses, and other structures dating from the Ottoman period. Later interventions during the Italian occupation added another layer to an urban landscape that had already undergone centuries of transformation.
What distinguishes the Medieval City is therefore not simply the preservation of a particular historical period, but the coexistence of different architectural, cultural, and historical layers within a city that continues to be inhabited and used. Its streets, buildings, fortifications, religious sites, and public spaces make visible a long history of encounters, transitions, adaptations, and transformations.
Within the BIP: Walking the City, Practising Dialogue
Within the BIP, the guided walk through the Medieval City is conceived as an integral part of the programme’s exploration of dialogue and its practices. Walking together shifts dialogue from the conventional teaching space into a shared movement through a place in which different histories, cultural forms, uses, and temporalities coexist.
The city becomes not simply an object to be observed, but a changing context for attention, conversation, and collective inquiry. Moving through its streets and encountering successive historical layers invites participants to consider how dialogue is shaped by position, perspective, memory, difference, and the spaces in which encounters take place. The walk thus explores dialogue as a situated practice: one that develops through movement, shared attention, and the continual negotiation of different ways of seeing and interpreting what is encountered.
Rhodes Toy Museum
Located near the village of Archipoli, in a natural setting surrounded by olive groves and pine forests, the Rhodes Toy Museum opened in November 2016. Its permanent collection, originating from the personal collection of its founder, Thanasis Ioannou, is devoted to toys made in Greece between the 1930s and the 1990s, when the last major Greek toy manufacturer, El Greco, ceased production.
The collection includes handmade and industrially produced toys, dolls, board games, trains, and other objects that trace several decades of Greek toy production and changing forms of childhood and play. Many of the toys are still functional and can be used by visitors, giving the museum an interactive dimension alongside its work of collection, preservation, and documentation. Particular attention is also given to the recording and preservation of traditional games, while the museum regularly hosts participatory activities involving schools and other groups.
Within the BIP: Play as a Practice of Dialogue
Within the BIP, the visit is conceived as part of the programme’s broader exploration of dialogue and its practices. Play offers a particularly fertile field in this respect: it unfolds through rules and their interpretation, interaction, response, negotiation, improvisation, and the continual adjustment of one participant to another. It creates a space in which acting together does not necessarily presuppose agreement, but requires attention to others and to the shared situation as it develops.
The museum therefore provides an opportunity to approach dialogue from within a practice that is at once embodied, relational, and experimental. Moving from the objects of play to the act of playing itself, the visit invites participants to consider how a shared space is constituted, how rules enable and constrain interaction, and how meaning may be generated through participation rather than simply exchanged as already formed content. In this sense, the visit extends the BIP’s philosophical work beyond the conventional teaching space and into another mode of thinking and experiencing dialogue together.
Seven Springs (Epta Piges)
Located in the interior of Rhodes, Seven Springs (Epta Piges) is a wooded area named after the natural springs that emerge at different points and feed a system of streams and an artificial lake. The site is characterised by plane trees, pine woodland, running freshwater, and Mediterranean vegetation, forming a distinctive ecosystem within the island’s landscape. The water from the springs is channelled through a narrow tunnel before reaching the artificial lake on the other side of the hill. The hydraulic works are associated with the irrigation system developed during the period of Italian rule in Rhodes to supply water to the agricultural area of Kolymbia. The site thus brings together natural processes and human intervention: springs and vegetation coexist with tunnels, channels, and other structures that have shaped the movement and use of water across the landscape.
Seven Springs also forms part of the Natura 2000 protected area “Rhodes: Profitis Ilias – Epta Piges – Petaloudes – Streams” (GR4210006), underlining the ecological significance of this interconnected landscape.
Within the BIP: Dialogue, Attention, and Place
Within the BIP, the visit to Seven Springs extends the exploration of dialogue towards the relation between attention and place. Moving through a landscape in which water, vegetation, pathways, and human interventions intersect, participants are invited to consider how a change of environment may also alter the conditions under which we observe, listen, move, and engage with one another.
Here, dialogue is approached not only as an exchange between speakers, but as a practice that is shaped by the situations in which it takes place. Walking together, attending to a shared environment, and encountering the different temporalities inscribed in the landscape open a space for considering how dialogue may involve receptivity, orientation, and responsiveness to what surrounds us. The visit thus becomes another mode of the BIP’s collective inquiry, allowing philosophical questioning to develop through movement, attention, and shared presence in a particular place.
The Acropolis of Lindos
Rising above the ancient settlement and the surrounding bays, the Acropolis of Lindos preserves the traces of successive historical periods and different uses of the site. Lindos was one of the three ancient cities of Rhodes and developed into an important maritime, commercial, and religious centre. At the heart of the Acropolis stood the sanctuary of Athena Lindia, whose history can be traced back to the Geometric period.
The architectural form visible today developed over several centuries. Following the destruction by fire of an earlier temple in 342 BC, the Doric Temple of Athena Lindia was rebuilt in the later fourth century BC, together with the Propylaea and monumental staircase; the large Hellenistic stoa was added subsequently. The organisation of the sanctuary through terraces, stairways, porticoes, and successive levels created a carefully articulated relationship between architecture, movement, and the surrounding landscape.
The site also bears the traces of later periods. Byzantine structures and the fortifications of the Knights of St John were incorporated into the Acropolis, so that the place encountered today cannot be reduced to a single historical moment. Ancient sanctuary, medieval fortification, settlement, and landscape coexist within a site that has been repeatedly occupied, transformed, interpreted, and preserved
Within the BIP: Dialogue across Time
As the final stage of the BIP excursion, the visit to the Acropolis of Lindos opens the question of dialogue towards history, interpretation, and temporality. Here, dialogue is explored not only between those who are present, but also through an encounter with traces left by different historical periods, practices, and forms of life within the same place.
The coexistence of successive architectural and cultural layers invites participants to consider how the past becomes present without ever becoming fully accessible to us. What does it mean to enter into dialogue with something that can no longer respond directly, but continues to address us through material traces, transformations, absences, and acts of preservation? The archaeological site thus becomes a space in which dialogue may also be approached as an interpretative practice: a movement between what remains, what has disappeared, what has been reconstructed, and the questions brought to the site by those encountering it in the present.
As the concluding visit of the excursion, Lindos brings the BIP’s exploration of dialogue into contact with historical distance and the persistence of traces, while returning participants to the question running through the programme as a whole: how dialogue becomes possible across differences that cannot simply be abolished.
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