About Rhodes

Rhodes is the largest of Greece's Dodecanese islands and the ninth-largest in the entire Mediterranean, covering around 1,400 square kilometres in the southeastern Aegean, barely 18 kilometres from the Turkish coast at its closest point. Long and narrow, the island stretches nearly 80 kilometres from Rhodes City in the north to the cape at Prasonisi in the south, a shape often likened to a spearhead, and its 2025 population is estimated at roughly 127,600 people, with the capital itself home to more than 50,000 residents and dozens of smaller towns and villages scattered across the mountainous interior. A limestone spine runs down much of its length, separating a busier east coast from a quieter, more exposed western shore.

Ancient and Byzantine History

Few Greek islands carry as layered a history. In antiquity, three Dorian cities, Lindus, Ialysus and Camirus, formed Rhodes' early identity before uniting in 408 BC around a single new capital, which grew into a maritime and cultural center with renowned schools of rhetoric and sculpture that drew students from across the Hellenistic world. The Colossus of Rhodes, a bronze statue of the sun god Helios completed in 280 BC to celebrate the island's successful defense against a year-long siege by Demetrius Poliorcetes, was counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World before an earthquake toppled it in 226 BC, after which the fallen statue reportedly lay on the ground for centuries. Rome later made Rhodes a permanent ally in 164 BC, valuing it as a hub for the education of noble Roman families who came to study under its famous rhetoricians, and from 395 AD the island belonged to the Byzantine Empire, whose maritime law code, the Rhodian Sea Law, influenced Mediterranean shipping practice for centuries afterward, long outlasting the empire that first codified it.

Knights, Ottomans and Union with Greece

The Knights of St John ruled the island from 1306 to 1522, fortifying its capital into the walled medieval town that still stands today. Their fortifications, rebuilt after a destructive earthquake in 1481, withstood a major Ottoman siege the following year before finally falling to Suleiman the Magnificent, who arrived with some 400 ships and 100,000 men, after a six-month siege in 1522. Ottoman rule lasted nearly four centuries, until Italy seized the island in 1912 during the Italo-Turkish War and formalized control through the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. German forces occupied Rhodes after Italy's 1943 armistice; the Turkish consul Selahattin Ülkümen sheltered roughly 200 of the island's Jewish residents from deportation during this period, though most of the long-established community did not survive the war. Germany surrendered the island to the British in May 1945, and Rhodes formally joined Greece in 1947 under the Paris Peace Treaties, after which several thousand Italian colonists were repatriated.

Old Town, Society and Architecture

Rhodes City's Medieval Old Town, protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, remains one of the best-preserved fortified medieval settlements in Europe. Its Street of the Knights leads to the restored Palace of the Grand Master, while the Kahal Shalom Synagogue, established in 1557, is the oldest surviving synagogue in Greece, a trace of a Jewish community that dated back more than two thousand years. Nearby, the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes and the ancient sites at Kameiros and Ialysos preserve material from the island's classical past, and the island is still known by its ancient epithets, the Island of the Sun and the Island of the Knights. Alongside the Greek Orthodox majority, Rhodes today retains a Muslim community of several thousand descended from Ottoman-era settlers and a smaller Catholic community tracing its roots to the Italian administration, a layered mix that mirrors the island's changing rulers over the centuries. Beyond the capital, dozens of smaller towns such as Ialysos and Archangelos each carry their own share of that mixed inheritance, from Byzantine chapels to Ottoman fountains still standing in their older quarters.

South along the coast, the hilltop Acropolis of Lindos, crowned by a 4th-century-BC Doric temple to Athena and reached by a steep stairway past narrow lanes of flower-covered courtyards, overlooks the whitewashed village below, home to a few thousand residents, and its curving twin bays. Inland, the medieval castles of Monolithos and Kritinia sit on defensive ridgelines that once formed part of the same coastal watch network as the walls of Rhodes City itself, built to give advance warning of raiders approaching from the sea long before radar or telegraph existed.

Geography, Nature and Economy

Inland, Mount Attavyros rises to 1,216 meters over a landscape of pine and cypress forest, and the Valley of the Butterflies near Petaloudes draws large seasonal gatherings of tiger moths every summer, feeding on the resin of the valley's storax trees before dispersing again once the heat of high summer passes. Rhodes enjoys one of the sunniest climates in Greece, with average annual sunshine exceeding 3,180 hours and mean temperatures around Lindos among the warmest recorded on any Greek island, a factor that, together with its archaeological sites and roughly 220 kilometers of coastline, has made tourism the island's dominant economic sector. Diagoras International Airport, near Paradisi on the west coast, and the modern harbour at Rhodes City handle the bulk of that traffic, while agriculture, chiefly citrus, wine grapes and olives, remains a secondary but steady source of income, much of it concentrated in the fertile coastal strips between the mountains and the sea. Smaller mountain villages such as Embonas, known for its local wine production, add a quieter, rural counterpoint to the crowded resorts along the eastern coast.

That mix of ancient ruins, medieval streets and open coastline draws visitors for very different reasons, but it's the coastline itself, dozens of bays that no road reaches, which is why so many visitors explore Rhodes by private gulet charter, reaching beaches and coves that the Old Town's crowds rarely see.