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THE RHODES CALCULATOR
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put in charge of the salvage operation of this historic sunken art,
which was to be presented as his patriotic gift to Greece. It was
done, and Condos felt great. His own home was on the Dodecanese
island of Syme, at that time ruled by Turks, whom Condos
hated. As you see, history does not change. The problem of
the Greeks and the Turks is the same today as it was seventyeight
years ago.
The Greek government ordered its navy to carry out the salvage
of the statues on the sunken ship. It was done the military
way: get things done fast no matter how. Big crane ships arrived,
and the divers pushed over the coastal shelf on which the
treasure ship rested all the big stone blocks from the deck of the
galley that hindered the divers from getting at the bronze statues.
Nobody noticed that the big stone blocks were huge statues
turned upside down so that the square sockets alone were visible
to the officer in charge of the operation. When this mistake was
finally noticed, orders were given to retrieve without fail
everything
that was on or inside the sunken ship. The museum of
Athens received the whole lot—the stone sculptures, the bronze
figures, a heap of broken bronze heads and arms, and some
lumps of indefinite shape that would be sorted out later. By the
end of summer in 1901 the sunken galley was nothing but an
empty hulk, 100 feet long and 40 feet wide, the standard measurements
for a Roman galley of 83 b.c. And this wreck remained
there totally abandoned for another fifty-two years until 1953
when Captain Jacques Cousteau and his divers visited it.
But meanwhile, back in 1902, a young Greek student by the
name of Valerio Stais had been sorting the broken pieces of
bronze at the National Museum in Athens. His task was to find
and match missing heads and arms so that the sculptures could
be restored, but he noticed a calcified lump of bronze that did
not fit anywhere and was not part of a statue. While drying, the
calcified mass had split in half and what was visible looked like
the insides of a big watch—gears and pinions and dials with inscriptions
in ancient Greek characters and signs of the zodiac.
Valerio Stais guessed that it must be an astronomical clock of
some sort or an instrument of navigation; he wrote a paper to announce
this finding to the scientific world, with the result that he
was declared to be a fool. The date of the sunken galley was in-