Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes

The Palace of the Grand Master, part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing of the Old Town, rises at the top of the Street of the Knights. It was the headquarters of the Knights of Saint John when they ruled Rhodes from 1309 to 1522, and it remains the great landmark of Rhodes’ Crusader past. The building began as a Byzantine fortification and was converted by the Order in the fourteenth century into a citadel-residence for the Grand Master, with a massive gate flanked by two round towers, a central courtyard and thick walls built to withstand siege. After the Ottoman conquest in 1522 it served as a fortress and later a prison.

What visitors see today is, in large part, a twentieth-century reconstruction. In 1856 a store of gunpowder in the nearby Church of Saint John exploded after being struck by lightning and wrecked the palace. When Italy ruled the Dodecanese in the 1930s the building was rebuilt on a medieval plan, intended as a holiday residence for the Italian head of state and for Mussolini, who never stayed there. Italian restorers brought in mosaic floors from the island of Kos and furnished the rooms with period pieces, so the interior is a blend of genuine medieval stonework and imaginative reconstruction.

Inside, the palace is now a museum with two main exhibitions. One follows the history of the city from its foundation in 408 BC through the era of the Knights, with sculpture, inscriptions and architectural fragments. The other shows medieval and early modern pieces: furniture, carved chests and decorative arts displayed on the upper floor, set among restored state rooms. The mosaics, many of them with Hellenistic and Roman geometric and figurative scenes, are among the highlights.

Visitors usually need about one to two hours. The courtyard has arcades and copies of classical statues, a popular place for photographs, and from the upper floors there are views across the rooftops of the Old Town toward the sea. The building has ramps and a lift in places, which helps those who find stairs difficult, though some of the medieval stairways remain steep.

The palace pairs naturally with a walk down the Street of the Knights, the Hospital of the Knights, the Ippoton quarter and the town walls. Because this is one of the island's major sights, the queue builds in midmorning when cruise passengers arrive, so a very early or late-day visit is a more relaxed experience.