Rhodes: the medieval city the Knights of St John built

In 1522, Suleiman the Magnificent besieged the city of Rhodes for six months with an army estimated at between one hundred and two hundred thousand men. Inside the walls, fewer than seven thousand Knights of St John and their local allies held out. When the Knights finally surrendered, Suleiman let them leave with their weapons, their archives and their ships. It was a gesture of respect with an unexpected consequence: the city they had built over two centuries was left entirely intact.

That integrity is what makes Rhodes Old Town unique in the Mediterranean. It is not a reconstructed medieval city, nor one restored with Romantic enthusiasm. It is a city that survived because its conquerors decided to inhabit it rather than demolish it.

The Knights and their urban project

The Knights Hospitaller of St John arrived in Rhodes in 1309, expelled from the Holy Land after the fall of Acre. What they found was a Greek city of some importance, with ancient walls and a well-positioned harbour on the trade route between the Levant and the western Mediterranean. What they built over the following two centuries was one of the most ambitious works of military engineering of the era.

The present walls, nearly four kilometres in length, were largely constructed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In some sections they are over twelve metres thick, with a system of moats, bastions and towers that represents the practical application of medieval poliorcetics — the science of siege warfare. Walking the rampart walkways, accessible on guided tours, makes clear why Suleiman took six months to take the city. These are not decorative walls. They are a war machine.

The Street of the Knights — Odos Ippoton in Greek — is the aristocratic heart of the medieval city and probably the best-preserved medieval street in Europe. A stretch of roughly two hundred metres, slightly uphill, flanked by the inns of the Order’s different “tongues” or nations: the Tongue of France, of Provence, of Spain, of England, of Germany. Each group had its own building. The carved stone doorways, the ogival windows, the heraldic shields still visible above the jambs: everything remains with a visual coherence that feels almost unreal.

The Palace of the Grand Master and hidden history

At the end of the Street of the Knights stands the Palace of the Grand Master, the residence and seat of government of the Order. What visitors see today is partly an illusion. The original palace was destroyed by a munitions explosion in 1856, during the Ottoman period. The reconstruction dates from the 1930s, when Rhodes was an Italian colony — the Dodecanese was administered by Italy from 1912 to 1943. The reconstruction is competent but free with its sources: the mosaics on the ground floor were brought from the island of Kos and never belonged to the original building.

This is not a minor detail. Fascist Italy had an ideological project in Rhodes: demonstrating the continuity between the ancient world, the medieval West and the modern Italian state. The palace reconstruction, the clearing of Ottoman neighbourhoods around it, the monumental architecture the Italians built in the new city — all of it served that narrative. The result is that what we visit today is a city whose historical layers have been interpreted and sometimes manipulated with specific political interests in mind.

The Ottomans and the city they adapted

When the Ottomans took the city, they did not hollow out the Knights’ urban project. They used it. The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Castle, on the main street, became the Mosque of Suleiman — still standing, with a minaret added in the nineteenth century, in the upper part of the Turkish quarter. The Knights’ inns became warehouses, administrative buildings, residences. The urban fabric remained; its meaning changed.

The Turkish Quarter — which in the Ottoman period was also home to Greeks, Jews and the rest of the non-military population — retains fountains, public baths (the sixteenth-century hammam on Arionos Square), and the texture of an Ottoman provincial administration town. It is a neighbourhood without tourists late in the afternoon, when the cruise groups have returned to their ships, and that quiet gives it something of its historical density back.

The Jewish Quarter and the twentieth century

The quietest part of the Old Town is the Jewish Quarter, in the southeastern sector near the sea walls. The Jewish community of Rhodes — Sephardic, descended from those expelled from Spain in 1492 — was one of the oldest in the eastern Mediterranean. In July 1944, the Nazis deported 1,700 Jews from Rhodes to Auschwitz. Eighty-seven percent died. The Kahal Shalom synagogue, built in the sixteenth century, is the oldest operating synagogue in Greece. Today the neighbourhood is largely emptied of its original community, but the synagogue, the epitaphs in medieval Spanish on the cemetery headstones, and the plaque in Jewish Martyrs Square tell a story that no medieval fortress could anticipate.

How to visit

Rhodes Old Town is pedestrian. Residents’ vehicles circulate on some main arteries, but the interior — the network of medieval streets, some of whose names remain Turkish or Ottoman — works on foot. The night visit, when the walls are lit and the daytime crowds have gone, is the most recommended for understanding the monumental scale of the ensemble. By day, the light is best first thing in the morning: by eight or nine, the streets of the Turkish Quarter are almost empty, and the Street of the Knights can be walked in peace.

The new city, north of the walls, has the airport eleven kilometres away and most of the hotels. The walk from the new city to the main gate is around twenty minutes — enough to cross from one century to several others.

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