Rhodes Suleymaniye Mosque

The Süleymaniye Mosque stands in the heart of Rhodes' Old Town, built shortly after the Ottoman conquest of 1522 and named for Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent to mark the empire's capture of the island — making it the first mosque raised in the town of Rhodes under Ottoman rule. Local tradition holds that it replaced an earlier Christian church on the same spot, a pattern repeated at several sites across the Old Town where places of worship changed hands along with the city itself.

From the Siege of 1522 to the First Mosque of Rhodes

For more than two centuries before the mosque existed, Rhodes belonged to the Knights Hospitaller, who had turned the harbour town into one of the most heavily fortified places in the eastern Mediterranean. That ended with a siege lasting roughly six months, at the close of which Grand Master Villiers de L'Isle-Adam accepted terms of surrender and the surviving knights were allowed to leave with military honours, withdrawing first to Crete and eventually settling on Malta. The Ottoman period that followed ran from 1523 until 1912, when Italy took the island, and Rhodes was formally united with Greece only after the Second World War.

The mosque belongs to the very first years of that Ottoman period, with construction generally dated to 1522-1523. It was named in honour of the sultan who had led the campaign, and its position inside the walls rather than outside them made the point plainly: the medieval city of the knights was now an Ottoman town. Over the following centuries the Old Town filled with mosques, bathhouses, fountains and Ottoman houses layered over Hospitaller stonework, and it is precisely that overlay of two eras that led UNESCO to inscribe the Medieval City of Rhodes on the World Heritage List in 1988.

Earthquake, Explosion and a Long Restoration

The building visible today is not, strictly speaking, the original. In 1808 the mosque was rebuilt following the same design as the first structure, and that reconstruction forms the core of what stands now. Disaster arrived in 1856, when an earthquake shook the town and, in the same year, lightning struck a gunpowder magazine stored beneath the nearby Church of Saint John. The resulting explosion destroyed the church outright and inflicted further damage on the mosque and the quarter around it.

The minaret has its own troubled history. Originally built with a single balcony, it was given a second one in the nineteenth century, repaired again in 1925, and finally taken down in 1987 because of structural problems that had made it unsafe. Major restoration and reconstruction of the whole building began in 1988 and were completed in 2005, work that returned the minaret to the skyline and preserved the historic fabric closely enough to earn an honorary distinction from Europa Nostra in 2006. The mosque was nonetheless closed again in 2014 pending further conservation, and since then it has opened only for special occasions.

Domes, Porticoes and a Borrowed Doorway

Architecturally the mosque looks back to an earlier phase of Ottoman building rather than the great imperial style that came later, and it was originally accompanied by adjoining tabhanes, hospices that offered lodging to travelling dervishes and other guests. The prayer hall is divided into three domed chambers: a central space beneath a large, high dome, flanked on either side by a room covered with a smaller and lower dome. Inside are a mihrab marking the direction of prayer and a minbar worked in walnut.

The entrance front is the most decorated part of the building, with a double narthex formed by an outer and an inner portico, the inner one carrying seven domes supported on eight columns. Set into it is an ornate marble archway carved with floral ornament that has nothing to do with Ottoman craftsmen at all. It originally belonged to a funerary monument built by the Knights Hospitaller between 1510 and 1520, and was moved and incorporated into the mosque in 1863. Few details anywhere in the Old Town sum up its layered history quite so neatly as a Latin Christian doorway framing the way into an Ottoman mosque.

Seeing the Mosque Today

The mosque sits at the top of Sokratous Street, the busiest of the Old Town's lanes, and the climb up from the harbour end brings its rose-tinted walls and minaret into view above the shopfronts. That pink-toned plaster is what makes the building so easy to pick out from a distance, and the minaret remains one of the defining verticals of the Rhodes skyline, visible from much of the harbour area and from the higher ground around the Palace of the Grand Master. Because the interior has been shut since 2014, an ordinary visit means admiring the exterior from the street rather than stepping inside, which is no great loss when the façade, the portico and that reused marble arch are the parts most worth studying anyway.

Framed by the same walls the Knights of St John once defended, the mosque is one stop among many on a walk through the narrow streets of the Old Town — a history many visitors pair, later the same day, with exploring the coast by boat from Rhodes, swapping medieval stonework for open water and quiet coves.