Rhodes

Rhodes is two islands in one, and the one decision that matters is which half to stay in. The medieval Old Town in the north has the Palace of the Grand Master, the Street of the Knights and the working harbour where the Colossus is said to have stood. Lindos and the southern beaches have the warmer water and feel more like a beach holiday. Splitting nights between the two means long drives each evening and less time in each. Choose one base.

The Old Town is one of the most complete medieval cities still inhabited in Europe, and it is UNESCO-listed. Its walls run for 4 kilometres around a lived-in quarter of stone lanes, with Gothic windows above the doorways. The cobbled Street of the Knights still runs uphill from the harbour to the palace, as it did in the fourteenth century. The Knights of St John held the island from 1309 to 1522, when Suleiman the Magnificent took it after a six-month siege. The Italians largely rebuilt the palace in the 1930s; the rest of the quarter is original.

Outside the walls, the new town shows the mark of Italian colonial rule: the Mandraki harbour façade, the Aquarium and broad civic boulevards that recall Trieste more than the Aegean. South of the city, the road runs 40 kilometres to Lindos. There the acropolis of Athena stands above a horseshoe of white houses, and the bay is at its clearest in late September. The Valley of the Butterflies, on the western side of the island, is at its peak in July and August, when Jersey tiger moths gather in the plane and oriental sweetgum trees.

Go in May, June, late September or October. July and August are hotter than in the Cyclades, and the Old Town fills with slow crowds of cruise day-trippers. Stay at least three nights in either base, or four if you want to see both halves of the island.

House Notes

  1. Arrival

    Rhodes airport, RHO (Diagoras International), is served by three handlers: Goldair Handling, Skyserv and Signature Flight Support. The FBO at Signature, the terminal for private flights, is the address for long-range private aircraft. The airport lies on the west coast, some 14 kilometres and a half-hour transfer from the medieval city, where most guests are based.

  2. The address

    Melenos Lindos, built by Michalis Melenos into the rocky flank below the Lindos acropolis, took 14 years to complete. It adapts the style of the early 17th-century Lindian captain’s house, with hand-carved stone facades, painted wooden ceilings and hohlaki pebble floors, and has only 12 suites, terraced down the hillside two minutes on foot from the acropolis path. The interior detailing is by Donald Green.

  3. Mavrikos

    Mavrikos has stood on the central square of Lindos since 1933 and is run by the third generation, Dimitris and Michalis Mavrikos, the latter educated at the London School of Economics. Their grandfather Mauritius opened the original house in 1912, under the Italian occupation. The chickpea purée with orange juice, the cuttlefish in its own ink with sweet wine and the lamb fillet with kumquat are the dishes that hold across the years.

  4. Marco Polo Mansion

    Marco Polo Mansion is a 500-year-old Ottoman house on Odos Fanouriou, in the former Turkish quarter of the Old Town, slowly recovered by Efi Dede, her husband Spiros and the Italian artist Giuseppe Sala. It has nine rooms and a courtyard restaurant in a walled garden, where dinner is by reservation only. It is the one address inside the walls for a full stay.

  5. Emery, at Embonas

    The Triantafyllou family has held the Emery estate at Embonas since 1923, 700 metres up the western flank of Mount Attavyros, the highest peak on the island. Athiri (white) and Mandilaria (red) are the two grapes that define Rhodian wine, and the Athiri Vounouplagias and the Zacosta blend are the bottles to follow. The tasting room opens from mid-April to mid-October.

  6. The Nestoridion

    The Museum of Modern Greek Art opened in 1964 under Andreas Ioannou, and its main hall, the Nestorideion Melathron on the Square of the Hundred Palms, was donated in 2002 by Ioannis and Paola Nestoridis. The collection holds work by Tsarouchis, Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, Parthenis, Engonopoulos, Moralis and Theophilos, the backbone of the 20th-century Greek canon. It stands in the new town rather than inside the walls.

  7. Kahal Shalom

    Kahal Shalom, on Dossiadou Street in La Juderia, the Sephardic Jewish quarter inside the walls, was completed in 1577 and is the oldest synagogue in Greece. The community spoke Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish language, and numbered around 4,000 at its height in the 1930s; on 23 July 1944 some 1,673 of the remaining 1,700 were deported to Auschwitz. It is the only one of the quarter’s four synagogues to survive, and the Jewish Museum of Rhodes occupies its adjoining women’s prayer hall.

  8. Profitis Ilias

    Profitis Ilias is the 798-metre peak in the interior that the Italians turned into a hunting estate. The Hotel Elafos was built in 1929 as the Albergo del Cervo, the Deer Hotel, named after the Rhodian fallow deer (Dama dama platoni), the only wild population of fallow deer in Greece and protected since 1969. The villa above belonged to Cesare Maria De Vecchi, Italian Governor from 1936 to 1940, and not to Mussolini, who never visited.

  9. The Hydrobiological Station

    On the far northern cape of the island, the Aquarium occupies the basement of a 1934 Art Deco building by the Italian architect Armando Bernabiti, with circular windows and a central cylindrical tower, now a listed monument of Greek modern heritage. It was built as the Reale Istituto di Ricerche Biologiche di Rodi and is today a research unit of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research. The 2,000-year-old skeleton of a Mediterranean monk seal in the corridor is the thing to find.

  10. The Grand Master’s Palace

    The Grand Master’s Palace was the seat of the Order of the Knights of Saint John, in the Kollakio at the head of the Street of the Knights, and was rebuilt in the 1930s as the residence of the Italian governor. The upper floor has mosaic floors the Italians lifted from secular and church buildings on Kos. The ground floor holds two permanent exhibitions tracing the city from its founding in 408 BC to the Ottoman conquest of 1522.

Anchorage Notes

  1. Rhodes Marina

    Rhodes Marina is next to the Central Port, 14 kilometres from the airport, and it is where a large yacht berths. It has some 600 berths for hulls of 30 to 200 feet, with power to 450 amps, fuel, a 200-ton travel-lift (a crane that lifts boats out of the water) and a helicopter pad. It is a full-service base for the southeast Aegean, with Rhodes 260 miles from Piraeus and 10 from the Turkish coast.

  2. Mandraki

    Mandraki is the ancient harbour of Rhodes, and the two bronze deer on columns at its mouth mark where the Colossus is said to have stood. The Port Fund, the town’s port authority, now keeps it as a marina of 175 berths for yachts up to 30 metres, with fishing boats and excursion boats among them, under the medieval walls of the old city.

  3. The commercial ports

    Rhodes town keeps its working ports apart from the yachts. Akandia takes the cargo and the ferries, daily to Piraeus and year-round to Crete and the Dodecanese, and the Tourist Port takes the cruise ships, with as many as 5,000 to 10,000 passengers in a day. A yacht lies at the marina or at Mandraki and leaves the freight and the liners to these two ports.

  4. Lindos

    Lindos is on a large bay on the east coast, its white village climbing to an acropolis (a fortified hilltop) crowned by the temple of Athena Lindia and the Castle of the Knights of St John. Below the rock, the near-landlocked cove of St Paul’s Bay opens through a narrow mouth, and the apostle is said to have come ashore here in a storm. A yacht lies off the village or in the cove beneath the walls.

Mythology

  1. Apollonius of Rhodes

    Apollonius’s title links him to Rhodes, but the evidence gives no single sure reason. Modern scholars think of either a time living on the island or a Rhodian family, while the story of his move there in the ancient Lives is confused.

  2. Helen

    Pausanias says that after Menelaus died, his sons Nicostratus and Megapenthes drove Helen out and she fled to Rhodes. Her friend Polyxo, widow of Tlepolemus, sent servants dressed as the Furies to hang her from a tree while she bathed, and the people of Rhodes built a shrine to Helen of the Tree, Dendritis.

  3. Helios

    The poet Pindar says Helios claimed Rhodes as it rose from the sea, and the united city later worshipped him as its protector. After the siege of 305 to 304 BC, Chares of Lindos made the bronze Colossus, which stood for 66 years before an earthquake brought it down.

  4. Hyperion

    Pindar’s ode for the Rhodian boxer Diagoras calls the sun god the son of Hyperion, and has him tell his own children on the island to be the first to raise an altar to Athena. From their line came Cameirus, Ialysus and Lindus, and the three cities of Rhodes carry those names.

  5. The Telchines

    Strabo says that before it was Rhodes the island was called Ophiussa, then Stadia, then Telchinis, after the Telchines who settled it first, and that this name held until the Dorian cities of Ialysos, Lindos and Cameirus divided the island between them. Diodorus sets their whole story here: the nursing of the infant Poseidon, the first statues of the gods, and the flight of the Telchines before the flood.

  6. Theia

    Rhodes belongs to Theia’s son. The historian Diodorus records that the island was held sacred to Helios and that the Rhodians honoured him above all other gods as the ancestor they were descended from, though Theia herself is not named in that account.