Medieval City of Rhodes

The Medieval City of Rhodes is the walled Old Town on the northern tip of Rhodes island, in Greece's South Aegean region. The Knights Hospitaller of St John took the island in 1309 and ruled it until 1522, when Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent captured it after a six-month siege. The Knights transformed an existing Byzantine town into one of the best-preserved medieval fortress cities in Europe, and the Ottomans, who held Rhodes until 1912, added mosques, baths and houses. The Italians then governed the island until 1947 and carried out major restorations in the 1930s. UNESCO inscribed the Medieval City of Rhodes on the World Heritage List in 1988. The Old Town is enclosed by roughly four kilometres of walls, with moats, bastions and gates such as the Gate of d'Amboise, the Gate of the Virgin Mary and the Marine Gate. Within them the layout divides broadly into the Collachium, the Knights' quarter around the Palace of the Grand Master and the Street of the Knights, and the Chora, where the civilian population lived. Preserved buildings include the inns of the langues, the Hospital of the Knights (now the Archaeological Museum), the Church of the Virgin of the Castle, Ottoman mosques such as the Mosque of Suleiman, the Hamam, the clock tower and the synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. Architecturally the city layers Gothic and early Renaissance military design with Ottoman and Italian additions. Streets are cobbled, many of them with pebble mosaics, and a number of buildings are still lived in and used as shops, restaurants and homes. Visiting is not a curated exhibition: the Old Town is a living district that can be explored in any order, while individual monuments such as the Palace and the museum have their own ticketed, themed displays. Restoration has been continuous. The Italian programme reconstructed the Palace of the Grand Master and reshaped parts of the Collachium, and the Greek Ephorate of Antiquities of the Dodecanese has since managed conservation, including repairs after the 1856 gunpowder explosion damage had already been mostly cleared and after later weathering. Overall the walls and the street plan are very well preserved, although some interiors have been altered by modern use. Walking the ramparts, which open on a ticketed basis for guided tours at set times, gives the clearest sense of the defensive design.