Dodecanese of Italianization, hoping to make Rhodes a modern transportation hub that would serve as a focal point for the spread of Italian culture in the Levant. The islands were overwhelmingly Greek-speaking, with a Turkish-speaking minority and an even smaller Ladino-speaking Jewish minority. Immigrant Italian speakers were a marginal language community. The Fascist program, in its many attempts to modernize the islands, eradicated malaria, and constructed hospitals, aqueducts, a power plant to provide Rhodes' capital with electric lighting, and established the Dodecanese Cadastre. The main castle of the Knights of St. John was also rebuilt. The concrete-dominated Fascist architectural style detracted
Dodecanese sources in the 8th century, as a naval command under a "droungarios", encompassing the southern Aegean Sea, which eventually evolved into the Theme of Samos. However it was not applied to the current island group, but to the twelve Cyclades islands clustered around Delos. The name may indeed be of far earlier date, and modern historians suggest that a list of 12 islands given by Strabo ("Geographica" Χ.485) was the origin of the term. The term remained in use throughout the medieval period and was still used for the Cyclades in both colloquial usage and scholarly Greek-language literature until the