Italian colonists in the Dodecanese colonists of Rhodes. In the Treaty of Paris in 1947, the islands were ceded to Greece. For the nearly 8,000 Italian colonists, after the Italian defeat in World War II, started a process of return to Italy and successive disappearance. The Dodecanese officially passed from Italy to Greece in 1947, and in that year all the Italian schools were closed. Some of the Italian colonists remained in Rhodes and were quickly assimilated. Actually only a few dozen old colonists remain, but the influence of their legacy is evident in the relative diffusion of the Italian language mainly in Rhodes and
Island of the Jewel Island of the Jewel The Island of the Jewel () or Island of Sapphires () was a semi-legendary island in medieval Arabic cartography, said to lie in the Sea of Darkness near the equator, forming the eastern limit of the inhabited world. The island does not appear in any surviving manuscript of Ptolemy's "Geography" nor other Greek geographers. Instead, it is first attested in the Ptolemaic-influenced "Book of the Description of the Earth" compiled by al-Khwārizmī around 833. Ptolemy's map ended at 180° E. of the Fortunate Isles without being able to explain what might lay on the imagined eastern