Rhodes

The city of Rhodes was created in 408 BC, when the island's three older cities — Ialysos, Kamiros and Lindos — joined together and built a new capital on the northern tip, laid out on a plan based on the ideas of the planner Hippodamus. Sea trade and shipbuilding made it rich. After resisting a year-long siege by Demetrius I of Macedon, which ended in 304 BC, the Rhodians raised the Colossus, a bronze statue of the sun god Helios by Chares of Lindos, near the harbour; an earthquake toppled it in about 226 BC. The city came under Roman control in 164 BC, stayed a centre of learning, and the Apostle Paul stopped here on his travels.

In the Middle Ages Rhodes was a Byzantine trading post until the Knights Hospitaller took it in the early 14th century. They rebuilt the town as a fortress, with the Grand Master's Palace, the Street of the Knights and ever stronger walls, which held off a Mamluk attack in 1444 and an Ottoman siege in 1480. In 1522 Suleiman the Magnificent besieged the city again, and on 1 January 1523 the Knights sailed away. Under the Ottomans, mosques and baths were built and the Greeks had to move to suburbs outside the walls.

Italy seized the island in 1912. Its planners cleared the houses built against the walls, rebuilt the Grand Master's Palace and put up a new administrative quarter around Mandraki harbour. In 1944 Allied bombing destroyed part of the old town, and in July that year the German authorities deported more than 1,700 of the island's Jews, of whom about 1,200 were murdered at Auschwitz; the Turkish consul Selahattin Ülkümen saved around 200 people. Rhodes joined Greece in 1947, the medieval town was protected in 1960 and listed by UNESCO in 1988.

Rhodes carries the layers of its rulers in plain view. The Gothic buildings of the Knights' high town, Ottoman baths and enclosed wooden balconies, the Kahal Shalom Synagogue and the Italian-era public buildings of Mandraki stand within a few minutes of each other. The island is Orthodox and seat of a metropolis, but it also has a Catholic community of about 2,000, many descended from Italians who stayed after the Italian occupation ended, and a Turkish Muslim minority whose ancestors were not included in the population exchange of the 1920s because the island was then Italian. The Jewish community, which once made up a third of the town, now numbers very few, and its museum keeps the memory of the Sephardic world that the war destroyed.

Rhodians speak a dialect that mainland Greeks describe as sing-song, with Turkish and Italian echoes and words they do not always understand. Sport is followed keenly: Diagoras and AS Rodos are the city's two major football clubs, basketball is equally popular, and the island hosted the Island Games in 2007 and holds the International Tour of Rhodes cycling race.

The town has also lived in the imagination of outsiders. The ancient saying "Hic Rhodus, hic salta!" names the island, The Guns of Navarone was filmed on the island, and Agatha Christie set her story Triangle at Rhodes here.

Rhodes town counted 49,541 people at the 2011 census, though some 65,000–70,000 are estimated to live there permanently, and the island as a whole had 125,113 at the 2021 census, the third-largest population of any Greek island. In summer the town's population reaches about 100,000, as its 25,000–30,000 hotel beds fill and seasonal workers arrive from the mainland.

Tourism drives the economy: the island has more than 550 hotels, most of them two-star. The town is also the administrative capital of the Dodecanese, with courts, the regional police and coastguard headquarters, the general hospital and departments of the University of the Aegean. The old street network of narrow, one-way streets cannot cope with the traffic, parking around the centre is extremely difficult in summer, and plans for a tram network presented years ago have gone no further.

Life follows the season. From spring to autumn cruise ships fill the harbours and the Old Town shops and bars stay open late; in winter the resorts close, but the town carries on with its schools, offices and markets. The scale of tourism is itself the main local issue, alongside the wildfires of 2023, which forced the largest evacuation in the country's history.

Rhodian cooking has its own repertoire. Lakani is goat cooked with chickpeas; matsi is a hand-made pasta used in a traditional dish called koulouria, and synoro a local cheese. Pitaroudia, katimeria pancakes and pies such as tahinopita and pougia pie are part of the tradition.

Sweets are a point of pride. Melekouni, a sesame and honey sweet, is a Rhodian speciality, alongside zvigoi, a local kind of loukoumades, amygdalota, white almond cookies, and fanouropita. Souma, a colourless spirit distilled from grapes, and koriantolino are the island's main traditional drinks, and the local wine is cheap. Citrus fruit, wine grapes, vegetables and olives grow on the island's arable strips of land, and olive oil is a common purchase to take home.

In the town, fish tavernas in the lanes and squares of the Old Town grill the local catch, while the cafés of Mandraki and the New Market fill with people waiting for buses and boats. Tap water is drinkable.