Rhodes
Rhodes is two islands in one, and the single decision that matters is which to base 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 the sense that you are on a holiday rather than inside a museum. Splitting nights between the two ends in long drives each evening and a thinner experience of both. Pick one.
The Old Town is one of the most complete medieval cities still inhabited in Europe. UNESCO-listed, four kilometres of walls enclose a working quarter of stone lanes, Gothic windows above doorways, and the cobbled Street of the Knights running 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 palace was largely rebuilt by the Italians in the 1930s; the rest of the quarter is genuine.
Outside the walls, the new town carries the imprint of Italian colonial rule — the Mandraki harbour façade, the Aquarium, the broad civic boulevards that look more Trieste than Aegean. South of the city, the road runs forty kilometres to Lindos, where the Athena acropolis stands above a horseshoe of white houses and the bay turns its clearest in late September. The Valley of the Butterflies, on the western flank, 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 the Cyclades and the Old Town becomes a slow shuffle of cruise day-trippers. Three nights minimum in either base, four if you want both halves of the island.
House Notes
Arrival
RHO (Diagoras International) is handled by Goldair Handling, Skyserv, and Signature Flight Support; the FBO at Signature is the address for long-range private aircraft. Yacht arrivals berth at Rhodes Marina S.A. — 600 wet berths, vessels to 200 feet on the standard quay and to roughly 60 metres further out, 14 kilometres from the airport. The historic Mandraki harbour, by contrast, takes draught to 5 metres only and is now largely a local-charter quay.
The address
Melenos Lindos, built by Michalis Melenos into the rocky flank below the Lindos acropolis, took fourteen years to complete and adapts the early 17th-century Lindian captain-house register — hand-carved stone facades, painted wooden ceilings, hohlaki pebble floors. Twelve suites only, terraced down the hillside, two minutes on foot from the acropolis path. Interior detailing by Donald Green.
Mavrikos
On the central square of Lindos since 1933, run by the third generation — Dimitris and Michalis Mavrikos, the latter London School of Economics. The 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.
Marco Polo Mansion
A 500-year-old Ottoman house on Odos Fanouriou in the former Turkish quarter of the Old Town, recovered slowly by Efi Dede, her husband Spiros, and the Italian artist Giuseppe Sala. Nine rooms; a courtyard restaurant in a walled garden where dinner is served by reservation only. The single sustained address inside the walls.
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; the Athiri Vounouplagias and the Zacosta blend are the bottles to follow. Tasting room open mid-April through mid-October.
The Nestoridion
The Museum of Modern Greek Art opened in 1964 under Andreas Ioannou; the principal hall, the Nestorideion Melathron on the Square of the Hundred Palms, was donated in 2002 by Ioannis and Paola Nestoridis. The collection holds Tsarouchis, Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas, Parthenis, Engonopoulos, Moralis, Theophilos — the spine of the twentieth-century Greek canon, in the new town rather than inside the walls.
Kahal Shalom
On Dossiadou Street in La Juderia, the Sephardic quarter inside the walls, the synagogue was completed in 1577 — the oldest in Greece. The community spoke Ladino and numbered around 4,000 at its 1930s height; on 23 July 1944 some 1,673 of the remaining 1,700 were deported to Auschwitz. Kahal Shalom is the only one of four synagogues in the quarter to have survived. The Jewish Museum of Rhodes occupies the adjoining women's prayer hall.
Profitis Ilias
The 798-metre interior peak the Italians turned into a hunting estate. The Hotel Elafos was built in 1929 as the Albergo del Cervo — Deer Hotel — its name taken from the Rhodian fallow deer (Dama dama platoni), the only wild population of fallow deer in Greece, protected since 1969. The villa above belonged to Cesare Maria De Vecchi, Italian Governor 1936–1940, not to Mussolini himself, who never visited.
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 — circular windows, central cylindrical tower, a listed monument of Greek modern heritage. Built as the Reale Istituto di Ricerche Biologiche di Rodi; today a research unit of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research. The 2,000-year-old Mediterranean monk seal skeleton in the corridor is the room to find.
The Grand Master’s Palace
The seat of the Order of the Knights of Saint John, in the Kollakio at the head of the Street of the Knights, rebuilt in the 1930s as the residence of the Italian governor. The upper floor carries mosaic floors the Italians lifted from secular and ecclesiastical 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. The reconstruction is candid; the antiquities below it are not.