"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.
The sky is leaden and there is just a faint pit-pat of rain.
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.
