Street of the Knights

The Street of the Knights, or Odos Ippoton, runs straight uphill through the Medieval City of Rhodes from near the old hospital to the Palace of the Grand Master, a length of roughly 600 metres. It is among the best preserved medieval streets in Europe, a European monument of the Middle Ages and the visual centrepiece of Rhodes’ Old Town, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Paved with cobbles and lined with plain, high stone facades, it is narrower and quieter than the shopping streets nearby.

The Knights Hospitaller of St John ruled Rhodes from 1309 until the Ottoman conquest in 1522, and during the sixteenth century they organised the street as the home of the Order's national groups, called Langues. Each Langue had an inn, or auberge, where its knights lived and dined, and the inns are marked by coats of arms and inscriptions over the doors. You can identify the auberges of France, Italy, Spain, Provence and England along the way, although the exact buildings date from various periods, mostly the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in a late Gothic style with some Renaissance touches. The French inn, with its elaborate carved front, is generally considered the finest.

Much of what the visitor sees was restored during the Italian occupation of the island in the 1920s and 1930s, when the street was cleaned of later additions and brought closer to its medieval character. An earlier gunpowder explosion in 1856 had damaged many buildings in the Old Town. The restorations remain debated, since they favour a polished medieval look, but they gave the street its present unified appearance.

At the bottom end stands the Hospital of the Knights, now housing the Archaeological Museum, and at the top end the Palace of the Grand Master, which closes the view. Walking uphill gives the best perspective, with the palace gradually growing larger above the rooftops.

The street is free to walk at any hour, and the stone is at its best early in the morning or around sunset, when the light grazes the facades and few groups are around. Cobbles are slippery when wet and cobbled sections are uneven, so sturdy shoes are advisable. The shaded Plateia Ippokratous and other squares in the adjacent lanes offer good places to stop for a coffee after the walk, and the street connects readily to the Old Town's walls and gates.