Rhodes Old Town

Enclosed within roughly 4 kilometers of medieval fortifications on the northern tip of Rhodes, the Medieval City of Rhodes is widely considered the largest continuously inhabited medieval town in Europe, with more than 6,000 residents still living inside its walls. UNESCO recognized the old town as a World Heritage Site in 1988, citing both the scale of its preserved architecture and the layered history of the empires that shaped it. The inscribed area covers roughly 65 hectares of Byzantine, Crusader, Ottoman and Italian building stacked on top of one another.

A Fortress Frozen at the Year 1522

The old town divides into two halves: the high town to the north, sometimes called the Collachium, built almost entirely by the Knights Hospitaller as their administrative and religious quarter, and the lower town to the south and south-west, where the Greek, Jewish and later Ottoman populations lived and traded. Individual stretches of wall were assigned to the Order's different langues, or tongues — France, Spain, Germany, England and Italy — and several bastions still carry those names.

The defences took their present form after a near disaster. During the Ottoman siege of 1480, the forces of Mehmed II breached the Bastion of Italy before being driven back, and an earthquake the following year damaged much of what remained. Grand Master Pierre d'Aubusson responded with a wholesale rebuild for the age of gunpowder: curtain walls were thickened with earthen ramparts packed behind the stone facing, gun embrasures were cut, and bastions extended to carry artillery. Because the Ottomans made few structural alterations after taking the city in 1522, the fortifications are effectively frozen at that date, preserving the transition from medieval to early modern military engineering better than almost any other site in the Mediterranean.

The Colossus, the Grid Plan and the Knights

The city itself was an act of political engineering. Rhodes was created in 408 BC, when the three older Dorian cities of Ialysos, Kamiros and Lindos merged into a single capital laid out on the grid principles associated with Hippodamus of Miletus. Its most famous monument was long gone before the Knights arrived: the Colossus of Rhodes, a bronze figure of the sun god Helios some 33 metres tall, was raised by the sculptor Chares of Lindos between roughly 292 and 280 BC to mark the city's survival of a year-long siege by Demetrius I of Macedon. It stood barely 54 years before an earthquake in 226 BC snapped it at the knees, and its exact position is still disputed.

The city's fortunes turned in 1309, when the Knights of St John, driven from their last stronghold in Palestine, took control of Rhodes and rebuilt it into a fortified bastion that withstood repeated sieges until falling to Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522.

Sultans, Kings and the Return to Greece

That final siege ran from 26 June to 22 December 1522. Suleiman's army, numbered by contemporary accounts in the hundreds of thousands, faced a garrison of roughly 6,700 men, only 703 of them knights, under Grand Master Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. Terms were agreed just before Christmas, and on 1 January 1523 the surviving defenders marched out and sailed for Crete; in 1530 Charles V granted the homeless Order Malta and Gozo.

Ottoman rule lasted until 1912, when Italy seized the island after a brief conflict; Rhodes and the rest of the Dodecanese were united with Greece in 1947. Under the sultans most churches inside the walls became mosques and the larger knightly houses became private mansions. The Italians, who governed until 1943, laid out a new city around the Mandraki harbour to designs by Florestano Di Fausto while restoring the medieval core, at times heavy-handedly. The Palace of the Grand Master shows both impulses: a late seventh-century Byzantine citadel adapted by the Knights, wrecked in 1856 when lightning struck a forgotten gunpowder magazine beneath a nearby church, then rebuilt between 1937 and 1940 as a holiday residence for Victor Emmanuel III and later Mussolini, its floors paved with ancient mosaics shipped from Kos.

What Survives Inside the Walls

Each period left its mark — Gothic arches along the Street of the Knights, the Palace of the Grand Masters, and the slender minaret of the Suleymaniye Mosque all stand within a few streets of one another. The Street of the Knights climbs from the hospital to the palace past the inns of the Order's national tongues. The hospital itself was begun in 1440 and finished under Pierre d'Aubusson between 1476 and 1503; since 1916 it has housed the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes, whose collection includes a Crouching Aphrodite of the first century BC, a marble head of Helios, and a Hellenistic pebble mosaic of Bellerophon fighting the Chimera. The Suleymaniye Mosque, raised after the conquest and rebuilt in 1808, anchors the Ottoman layer at the top of Socratous Street.

A third community left a quarter of its own. La Juderia, the Jewish district in the eastern part of the lower town, centres on the Kahal Shalom Synagogue, founded in 1577 and the oldest surviving synagogue in Greece. In the summer of 1944 the German occupiers deported 1,673 Jews from Rhodes to Auschwitz and only around 150 survived; a small museum beside the synagogue documents a Ladino-speaking community that had lived on the island for centuries.

Visiting the Old Town

Eleven gates lead through walls that once held off Ottoman cannon fire, and the narrow lanes behind them are now lined with tavernas, jewelry shops, and bakeries rather than soldiers' barracks. The Marine Gate opens straight onto the commercial harbour, the natural entry point for anyone stepping off a boat, while the dry moat ringing the landward side is now a quiet green walk below street level. For visitors arriving by sea, the old town remains a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Rhodes, an easy walk from the harbor into nearly seven centuries of layered history.