Rhodes Medieval City

The Medieval City of Rhodes is one of the largest and best preserved inhabited medieval towns in Europe and has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1988. Inside a ring of walls that the Knights of St John spent two centuries rebuilding, ancient Greek foundations, a Gothic upper town, Byzantine churches and Ottoman mosques all sit within a few hundred metres of each other, and around 6,000 people still live there.

From the Greeks to the Knights

The city was founded in 408 BC, when the island's three older cities of Lindos, Ialysos and Kameiros joined together and laid out a new capital at the northern tip of Rhodes. It was here, between roughly 304 and 280 BC, that the Colossus of Rhodes was raised, a bronze statue of the sun god Helios by the sculptor Chares of Lindos. An earthquake brought it down around 226 BC and nothing of it survives.

The Knights of the Order of St John reached Rhodes after the loss of the Crusader states: Acre, their last stronghold on the mainland, fell in 1291, and after a period on Cyprus they took the island, with their possession of it confirmed in 1309. Over the next two hundred years they turned the town into one of the strongest fortresses in the eastern Mediterranean. It held off a Mamluk attack in 1444 and a full Ottoman siege under Mesih Pasha in 1480.

The end came in 1522, when Suleiman the Magnificent besieged the city for six months. The knights negotiated terms and sailed out on 1 January 1523, eventually settling on Malta. Under Ottoman rule mosques and baths were built, several churches were converted, and the medieval fabric of the town was left largely intact, which is why it survives today.

The Upper Town

The upper town, the walled quarter the knights kept for themselves, is entered along the Street of the Knights, a cobbled street running uphill that has kept its medieval frontages almost completely. Along it stand the inns of the langues, the national divisions of the Order. There were seven of these from 1319 onwards, and eight after 1462, when Castile, Leon and Portugal split from the Aragonese langue. Each inn housed the knights of one langue and carried its own responsibilities within the Order.

• Palace of the Grand Master - the administrative and military centre of the Order, at the top of the street. The building was wrecked by an explosion in the 19th century and rebuilt under the Italian administration in the 1930s; it now holds collections ranging from ancient mosaics to material from the Ottoman period.
• Inn of Auvergne - close to the site of the knights' first hospice, with the arms of Guy de Blanchefort, Grand Master in 1512-13, on its facade.
• The Great Hospital - a fifteenth-century building on the south side of the Street of the Knights, where the Order treated pilgrims and the sick. It houses the archaeological museum today.

The Lower Town

The lower town was where everyone else lived: Greeks, Latin merchants and, later, Ottoman Turks and Sephardic Jews. Its street plan is medieval and irregular, and the buildings reflect every phase of the city's history.

• Ottoman monuments - the Suleymaniye Mosque, the largest in the old town, along with the Sultan Mustafa Mosque, the hamams and the Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library, which holds Ottoman and Persian manuscripts.
• Byzantine churches - several survive in the lower town, a number of them converted to mosques after 1522 and later returned to use as churches or museums.
• Public buildings - the Court of Commerce and the Archbishop's Palace, which show the town's role as a trading and administrative centre.

The Fortifications

The walls are the reason the city looks as it does. They were built on Byzantine foundations and continuously enlarged and remodelled between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries as artillery improved, growing thicker, lower and more angled with each campaign. The circuit is still complete, with its gates, dry moat and bastions, and the sections facing the harbour give the clearest idea of what an attacking fleet would have been up against.

The Jewish Quarter

La Juderia, the Jewish quarter, occupies the eastern part of the old town, beside the commercial harbour. Its community was largely Sephardic, arriving after the expulsion from Spain in the sixteenth century, and by the 1920s some 4,000 Jews lived here with six synagogues. Kahal Shalom, built in 1577 and the oldest synagogue in Greece, is still standing on Dossiadou Street, with the Jewish Museum beside it. The quarter's central square is named Evreon Martyron, the Square of the Jewish Martyrs, for the community deported in 1944.

Mandraki and the Acropolis

North of the old town is Mandraki, the ancient naval harbour, guarded at its entrance by the Fortress of Agios Nikolaos. Two columns topped with bronze deer, the emblem of Rhodes, stand at the harbour mouth; they were put up during the Italian period and refer to the old story, recorded in antiquity, that deer were brought to the island to deal with a plague of snakes.

About 3 kilometres southwest of the walls, on the hill known as Monte Smith, is the acropolis of the ancient city. The temple of Athena Polias and Zeus Polieus stood at its summit, and the site also has a stadium, a small odeon used for music and rhetoric, a gymnasium and the partly re-erected columns of the temple of Apollo. The knights built their city facing the sea and meant its defences to be read from there, so anyone chartering a gulet from Rhodes gets the approach the walls were designed around: the seaward curtain, the harbour mouth and the fortress closing it.