🇬🇷 Greece · Crete and the Dodecanese
Rhodes is the island where the Middle Ages are still alive. At the far southeast of the Aegean, a step from Turkey, it holds the largest inhabited medieval city in Europe: a walled old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where you still walk the same cobbled streets the Knights Hospitaller walked seven hundred years ago. The Palace of the Grand Master, the Street of the Knights and its three kilometres of walls and moats carry you to another age. And over it all hovers the memory of the Colossus of Rhodes, the giant bronze statue that was one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
But Rhodes is not just the medieval city. It is also the 'island of the sun', with a very long beach season, white villages such as Lindos — crowned by a spectacular acropolis above the sea — ancient sites such as Kamiros, green valleys where thousands of butterflies settle in summer, and a mountainous interior of pine woods and wineries. Half an hour away by boat are the lovely island of Symi and the Turkish coast at Marmaris, for a day trip to another country.
This guide covers Rhodes with a practical eye: how to make the most of the Medieval City without falling into the tourist traps, what is really worth seeing in Lindos, how to reach the Valley of the Butterflies and Kamiros, and what to expect (honestly) from the myth of the Colossus, of which absolutely nothing remains today. It also tells, with the seriousness it deserves, the island's most painful memory: the Jewish community of Rhodes, deported almost in its entirety in 1944. Rhodes rewards the traveller who mixes beach with history.
Rhodes was a maritime and trading power in antiquity, famous for its Colossus — a giant statue of the god Helios raised around 280 BC and one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — brought down by an earthquake a few decades later. It passed through Rome and Byzantium, but its most defining period came in 1309, when the Knights Hospitaller (the Order of St John) made it their base and raised the imposing fortified city that is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They withstood a first Ottoman siege in 1480, but in 1522 Suleiman the Magnificent defeated them and drove them out towards Malta. Almost four Ottoman centuries followed; then the Italian occupation (1912–1943), which rebuilt monuments to its own taste; the brutal deportation of the Jewish community in 1944; and finally, after a British interlude, the incorporation of Rhodes and the Dodecanese into Greece in 1947. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The great island of Crete, cradle of the Minoan civilisation and its palace of Knossos, the scene of the airborne battle of 1941; and the Dodecanese, with the Rhodes of the Knights Hospitaller and the islands that were under Italian occupation until after the Second World War.
Read the history of Crete and the Dodecanese →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Rhodes was, in antiquity, a maritime and trading power of the first order. The island was inhabited from remote times and held three great Dorian cities — Lindos, Ialysos and Kamiros — each with its harbour and its territory. In 408 BC those three cities decided to join forces and found a common capital at the northern tip of the island: the city of Rhodes, laid out on a regular grid plan attributed to the town planner Hippodamus of Miletus. Thanks to its strategic position between the Aegean, Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, the new Rhodes prospered enormously on trade and became one of the richest cities in the Greek world.
In 305–304 BC, Rhodes withstood a famous siege by the Macedonian general Demetrius Poliorcetes ('the besieger'). When the enemy withdrew, the Rhodians sold the enormous abandoned siege equipment and, with the proceeds, financed a thanksgiving monument that would become legendary: the Colossus of Rhodes. Raised around 280 BC by the sculptor Chares of Lindos, it was a bronze statue of the sun god Helios, protector of the island, about 30 metres tall, standing beside the harbour. It was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
Its glory was short-lived: around 226 BC, barely half a century after it was built, a violent earthquake snapped the statue at the knees and brought it down. The Rhodians, warned by an oracle, did not dare rebuild it, and the enormous bronze fragments lay on the ground for centuries, admired by travellers, until they were finally sold as scrap. Today absolutely nothing remains of the Colossus. And it is worth dismantling a much-repeated myth: the popular image of the statue straddling the harbour mouth with its legs apart, letting ships pass underneath, is a medieval invention with no basis at all. Engineering analysis shows that a bronze figure like that would have collapsed under its own weight; the Colossus stood upright, legs together, beside the harbour, not over it.
After ancient Rhodes came the Romans and then the Byzantines, who governed it for centuries and Christianised it, though the island suffered raids by Arabs and pirates. But the chapter that gave Rhodes its present face began in the early 14th century. The Order of St John of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitaller — a military and religious order born during the Crusades to care for and protect pilgrims in the Holy Land — had lost its base in the East after the fall of Acre in 1291. Looking for a new home, the Hospitallers conquered Rhodes, taking it from Byzantine control, and completed their hold by around 1309.
For more than two centuries, from 1309 to 1522, the knights turned Rhodes into a state of their own and into a formidable Christian bastion against the advance of Islam in the eastern Mediterranean. Organised by 'tongues' or nationalities (France, Italy, Aragon, Castile, Provence, Auvergne, England, Germany), they raised one of the greatest works of medieval military architecture: the fortified city that is today a World Heritage Site. They built kilometres of walls, towers and moats, the Palace of the Grand Master, the Street of the Knights with its inns, the great Hospital and numerous churches. From here they also dominated the sea with their fleet and harried Ottoman ships.
The Rhodes of the knights was a cosmopolitan and powerful city, capital of a small monastic-military state that held out, against all odds, for generations on the very frontier between two worlds. That Gothic, chivalric legacy is what makes the Medieval City of Rhodes unique: walking through it means stepping into the world of the orders of chivalry as it was at the end of the Middle Ages.
The position of Rhodes, so close to the coast of Asia Minor and right on a shipping route, made it a thorn in the side of the rising Ottoman Empire. A clash was only a matter of time. In 1480 sultan Mehmed II — the same man who had taken Constantinople in 1453 — sent a great fleet and an army to conquer the island. The knights, under Grand Master Pierre d'Aubusson, withstood a brutal siege and, against all odds, threw the Ottomans back. That first siege of 1480 was a celebrated victory throughout Christendom and reinforced the Order's defences and prestige.
But the rematch came four decades later, and this time the outcome was different. In June 1522 the young and ambitious sultan Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Rhodes with overwhelming force: a fleet of hundreds of ships and an army the sources put in the tens of thousands of men, far superior to the few hundred knights and their allies. The siege was long, bloody and exhausting, with mines, bombardments and assaults that went on for months. The defenders, under Grand Master Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, held out heroically to the limit, but with no reinforcements from Europe the situation became untenable.
In December 1522 L'Isle-Adam negotiated a surrender to avoid a massacre of the civilian population. Suleiman, impressed by the enemy's courage, granted honourable terms: on 1 January 1523 the surviving knights left Rhodes with their arms and their relics. After years without a fixed base, they settled in Malta in 1530, ceded by the emperor Charles V, which is why they went down in history as the Knights of Malta. Rhodes thus came under Ottoman rule, which would last almost four centuries: mosques and hammams were built, many churches were turned into mosques, and the medieval city of the knights took on a new Eastern layer that can still be felt today.
The long Ottoman period ended unexpectedly in the 20th century. In 1912, in the context of the Italo-Turkish war, the Kingdom of Italy occupied Rhodes and the rest of the Dodecanese. What was presented as a temporary occupation became a possession Italy held for more than three decades, from 1912 to 1943. The Italians deeply transformed the island: they modernised it with public works, roads, hospitals and administrative buildings in rationalist and eclectic style, many still standing in the new town of Rhodes.
Under Mussolini's fascist regime, the Italian government also undertook an ambitious — and controversial — campaign to restore the medieval monuments, with the political intent of claiming a supposed continuity between the Rhodes of the knights (whose Italian 'tongue' they stressed) and modern Italy. In the 1930s they thoroughly rebuilt the Palace of the Grand Master, which had been left in ruins after a great powder magazine explosion in 1856, to turn it into a summer residence for Mussolini and the king of Italy (who in practice hardly used it). They also restored the façades of the Street of the Knights and other buildings.
Those interventions are debated today. On one hand, they saved and recovered a heritage that was falling apart and gave the Medieval City much of its present appearance. On the other, many reconstructions were historicist and at times not very faithful to the original, designed more to convey an image of grandeur than to respect history strictly. So when you visit the imposing Palace of the Grand Master, it is worth knowing that much of what you see — above all the interiors — is an Italian recreation of the 1930s, not the authentic medieval fabric. The Italian mark, for better and for worse, is inseparable from the Rhodes we admire today.
For centuries Rhodes was home to one of the oldest and most vibrant Jewish communities in the Mediterranean. They were mostly Sephardic Jews, descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492, who settled on the island under Ottoman rule and spoke Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). Their quarter, the Juderia (or Djuderia), in the southeastern part of the Medieval City, was a flourishing centre of religious, commercial and cultural life, with its synagogues — among them Kahal Shalom, the oldest still standing in Greece — its schools and its traditions. At the start of the 20th century several thousand Jews lived in Rhodes.
Under the Italian occupation the community at first lived with relative normality; Mussolini even established a prestigious rabbinical seminary on the island in 1928, attended by students from across the Mediterranean. But the fascist racial laws of 1938 began to strangle the community, and many emigrated. The final blow came with the war. In September 1943, after the fall of Mussolini and the Italian armistice, Nazi Germany occupied Rhodes.
In July 1944, with the Third Reich already in clear retreat, the SS carried out one of the most atrocious crimes in the island's history. On the pretext of a document check, they gathered almost the entire remaining Jewish population — around 1,700 people — and deported them. One episode of humanity stands out amid the horror: the Turkish consul Selahattin Ülkümen managed to save several dozen Jews by claiming they were Turkish citizens. The rest were crammed onto ships used to carry livestock, in appalling conditions; they also picked up the Jews of neighbouring Kos and, after a dreadful sea journey to the port of Athens, they were sent by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau in early August 1944. It was the last great deportation of Greek Jews and one of the longest of the entire Shoah. Of that centuries-old community, only some 150 Rhodians survived the camps. Today a marble obelisk in the old Juderia commemorates the victims, and the Kahal Shalom synagogue, now a museum, keeps alive the memory of a world that was almost entirely erased.
The final fate of Rhodes was decided in the last years of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. After the German occupation, and with the defeat of the Axis, the Dodecanese was left in a transitional situation. In May 1945 the German troops on the islands surrendered, and the administration of Rhodes and the rest of the archipelago passed to a British military authority, which governed the islands provisionally for a couple of years while their future was negotiated in the peace treaties.
For the people of the Dodecanese, mostly Greek, the goal had been clear for generations: union with Greece, from which they had been left out while the rest of the country won independence in the 19th century and expanded in the 20th. Neither Ottoman rule nor Italian occupation had erased that national aspiration. The Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, which set the postwar terms with Italy, finally settled the question: Italy ceded the Dodecanese to Greece.
On 7 March 1948, after the formal handover from the British administration, Rhodes and the other islands of the Dodecanese officially and definitively joined the Greek state. That closed a history of centuries of foreign rule — Byzantine, of the knights, Ottoman, Italian — and Rhodes became, for the first time in the modern era, fully Greek territory. Since then the island has gone through a deep transformation: from a traditional economy it became one of the great tourist destinations of the Mediterranean, thanks to its climate, its beaches and, above all, that unique medieval old town visited by millions of people today. Contemporary Rhodes combines that tourist vocation with pride in an extraordinarily dense history, written by all the peoples who passed through its walls.