History

The springs at Kallithea were credited with healing properties long before the twentieth century; tradition associated the waters with the treatment of skin disease and rheumatism. What turned reputation into infrastructure was the Italian occupation of the Dodecanese. The baths belong to the building programme with which Italy equipped its Aegean possession, works that served visitors and the prestige of the administration in equal measure. In 1927 the civil governor, Mario Lago, commissioned a scientific study of the waters, and its favourable findings set the project in motion.

Lombardi’s complex went up quickly and was inaugurated in a festive ceremony in July 1929, taking the official name of Royal Thermae after the king’s attendance. Through the 1930s the baths ran as a cosmopolitan resort, drawing large summer crowds for supervised courses of mineral-water therapy that typically lasted fifteen days. The Second World War ended the season for good reasons of geography: the Dodecanese became a theatre of war, and the clientele vanished.

Under Greek administration the hydrotherapy operation carried on into the post-war decades, then shut down in the late 1960s. The buildings stood open to the weather for forty years, a slow ruin filmed and photographed by visitors. The Greek state listed the complex as a protected monument in 1985, restoration followed, and in 2007 the baths reopened as a cultural venue for exhibitions, performances and events.