Rhodes Old Town: 2,400 Years in 90 Minutes

The Old Town of Rhodes is UNESCO World Heritage, entirely enclosed within medieval walls built by the Knights Hospitaller in the fourteenth century, and still functioning as a living neighbourhood rather than a museum. People live there, run laundries and hardware shops and bakeries there, park their motorcycles in the street there, conduct the ordinary business of a small Greek town — within walls that have stood for 700 years.

Enter through the d'Amboise Gate in the northwest and walk east along the Street of the Knights, which is the most intact medieval street in the Mediterranean: the palaces of the individual national langues of the Knights — Italian, French, Spanish, Provençal — face each other across a cobbled lane barely wide enough for two people to pass. The effect, if you arrive early enough to have it to yourself, is genuinely anachronistic.

The Palace of the Grand Masters, at the top of the Street of the Knights, was destroyed in a gunpowder explosion in 1856 and reconstructed by the Italian colonial administration in the 1930s as a summer residence for Mussolini — who never used it. The interior mixes Byzantine mosaic floors (authentic, removed from Kos) with Fascist-era furniture, which creates an atmosphere of considerable historical dissonance. Worth seeing for this reason alone.

The lower town, below the Street of the Knights, is the daily-life Rhodes: the market street of Sokrates is the commercial spine, flanked by shops selling herbs, sponges, ceramics, and excellent olive oil. The mosque of Süleyman — built in 1522 after the Ottoman conquest — still anchors the market area with its pink minaret, the only functioning architectural relic of 250 years of Ottoman administration.