Historic Cities · Greece
Rhodes through the ages
Rhodes is the principal city and a former municipality on the island of Rhodes in the Dodecanese, Greece. Since the 2011 local government reform, it is part of the municipality Rhodes, of which it is the seat and a municipal unit. It has a population of approximately 56,000 with nearly 90,000 in its metropolitan area.
Rhodes in 1520
City of the Knights
Rhodes in 1520 is the Hospitaller capital at its polished height: fortified streets, naval trade and the eight langues of the Order arranged around the Grand Master's convent. The walk moves from the harbour and mole into the merchants' quarters and up the Street of the Knights to the palace and hospital, showing daily commerce, sea traffic and the island's mixed Greek and Latin life.
A compact medieval citadel of pale, roughly hewn stone, Rhodian roofs of red tile and flat terraces sit behind high battlemented walls and squared towers. Low-slung warehouses and arcaded façades crowd the harbour; narrow, sunlit lanes thread between Gothic inns of the langues and arcaded hospitals. The scale is human — ships at quay, windmills on the mole, olive trees and Cyprus cypresses threading the upper convent gardens.
The route: 16 streets, squares and views
Mandraki Harbour Approach → Fort of St Nicholas → Mandraki Windmills → Marine Gate (Porta Marina) → Merchants' Street → Greek Bazaars → La Juderia (Jewish Quarter) → Harbour Warehouses Quay → Street of the Knights → Auberge of France → …
Step inside, 8 interiors
Icon Painter's Workshop · Spice and Soap Warehouse · Hall of the French Tongue · Italian Auberge Refectory · Council Chamber · Palace Spiral Stair · Great Infirmary Ward · Chapter Hall of Saint John
Planned from the Wikipedia record: Rhodes (city).
From the archive
Rhodes on paper: the old town as it was mapped.
A period plan or bird's-eye view of the old town, drawn between 1500 and 1850 — the streets this page's reconstructions walk. Public domain, with its source named.
Bird's-eye view of Rhodes, from Braun & Hogenberg's Civitates Orbis Terrarum
Depicts Rhodes’ concentric fortified walls and bastioned harbour with breakwaters, harbour gate, internal street blocks, churches and windmills.
1572 · Georg Braun; Frans Hogenberg · Wikimedia Commons
Public domain (plate dated 1572)
Castles of Rhodes
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