Overview
The Knights ran Rhodes as a crusader state for two centuries and left the Street of the Knights, a straight cobbled lane lined with the inns of their national tongues, and the hospital that is now the archaeological museum. Suleiman took the city in 1522 after a six-month siege and let the garrison leave; the Ottomans then added the mosques, hammams and wooden balconies that give the lanes their second layer. Italian administrators restored much of it in the 1930s, sometimes inventing what they could not document.
Highlights
Walk the Street of the Knights early, before the cruise groups arrive from the commercial harbour. The dry moat is a public park and the best way to read the fortifications; enter at the d’Amboise Gate and come out near the Gate of the Virgin. The archaeological museum, in the Knights’ hospital ward, holds the sea-worn Aphrodite raised from the water off Rhodes in 1929, the statue Lawrence Durrell called the Marine Venus.