"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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
