Greece putting Mussolini's retreat on the auction block

Or anyway that was the plan back in 1936 when il Duce was still at the height of his fleeting glory that would be swept away by a sea of blood. Benito never made it to old age, but the villa built on a height named after the prophet Elijah, Profitis Ilias in Greek, is an asset belonging to the Greek state, and as such it has now come up for sale, or rather a fifty year lease, to help get the state out of its economic rut.

In this light, the villa is now being peddled by the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund along with 13 other long-disused properties as prospective small luxury hotels. The fund is selling three of the property assets and offering leases of between 50 and 99 years for the rest.

“There’s been a significant shift in investor sentiment on real estate assets in the past 12 months, both globally and locally,” Andreas Taprantzis, executive director for real estate at the Athens-based fund, said in an interview to Bloomberg. “The only criterion is the highest bid per asset.”

Despite the very tasty morsels up for sale by the fund, that hopes to raise 50 billion euros through the sale of what many believe is the “family silverware,” the whole process often flounders upon bureaucratic snags, ineptitude, a nebulous legal framework and “political resistance to selling sovereign land”.

As Bloomberg reports projections for asset disposals now stand at 22.4 billion euros through 2022, but so far, the fund has signed 4.9 billion euros in deals, while actually putting 2.9 billion euros in state coffers. Of that, real estate deals have brought in a paltry 1.8 billion euros.

The specific building was built by the Italian governor of the time, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, among Rhodes’s pine trees with panoramic views of the Aegean Sea. Yet the stone and wood building has been standing abandoned and vandalized with graffiti is scrawled over the walls and fireplaces of the two-story stone and wooden structure. The villa faces the Elafos and Elaphina Hotel, built in the Alpine style, another example of the fascist dictator’s plans for Rhodes to be an outpost of an Italian empire.

The villa served as De Vecchi's personal domicile while he was governor of the Dodecanese and was also designated as a summer retreat for Italian king Vittorio Emanuelle and fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. After the cession of the Dodecanese to Greece the villa became a designated regal residence for Greek royals but was actually left to its fate, falling victim to neglect.