Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes

Listen for a moment. Your footsteps echo off pale stone, and the air in the gateway feels cooler than the street behind you. Above, two round towers rise on either side of the entrance. Their walls are thick, their windows narrow, and the sunlight falls in hard, bright bands across the cobbles. You are standing at the highest point of the old town of Rhodes. You are also standing at the door of a building that has been a fortress, a ruin, and a stage set.

This is the Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes. Many visitors arrive by walking up the Street of the Knights, the long, straight medieval lane below. If you came that way, you passed the old inns of the knights, grouped by language and homeland. The palace sits at the top of that street like a full stop. It was the seat of power for an entire religious order, and the building was designed to make that power felt.

So who were these knights? They were the Knights Hospitaller, also known as the Knights of Saint John. The order began in Jerusalem, caring for sick and poor pilgrims. Over time it became a military order as well, fighting in the Crusades. After the Crusader states fell, the knights needed a new home. In the early fourteenth century they took Rhodes, and they ruled the island for more than two hundred years.

The leader of the order was called the Grand Master, and this was his residence and his headquarters. But it was never just a palace. It was a citadel inside a walled city, a last line of defence if the outer walls failed. Look again at those towers by the gate. They are built for war, not for show. The knights lived on a frontier between Christian Europe and the expanding Ottoman Empire, and they knew it.

That frontier eventually closed in on them. In 1522, the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent besieged Rhodes with an enormous army. The knights held out for months. In the end, they negotiated a surrender and were allowed to leave the island with honour. They later settled on Malta, where the order became known as the Knights of Malta. Rhodes, and this palace, passed into Ottoman hands for nearly four centuries.

Under Ottoman rule, the palace lost its role as a princely home. It was used for practical purposes, including as a prison. Then came the disaster. In 1856, a huge explosion tore through this part of the old town. Gunpowder had been stored nearby, in the area of the old Church of Saint John, and it ignited. The blast badly damaged the palace and left much of it in ruins. For decades, this hilltop held broken walls rather than a grand residence.

Here is the first surprise. Much of what you see today is not medieval at all. In 1912, Italy took control of Rhodes and the other Dodecanese islands. In the late 1930s, the Italian authorities rebuilt the palace almost from the ground up. It was meant to serve as a residence for the Italian king and for Mussolini. The war intervened, and the rebuilt palace was never really used the way its planners intended.

Historians are careful about this reconstruction. The Italian architects worked from old drawings, descriptions, and surviving foundations. But they also used a great deal of imagination. Some spaces are grander than the originals probably were, and the interior was fitted with modern comforts like electricity. So as you walk through, you are seeing two stories at once. One is the medieval fortress of the knights. The other is the dream of a twentieth-century regime that wanted to borrow their prestige.

Step into the courtyard and look around its edges. You will see ancient statues standing in niches and along the walls. These are much older than the knights. Many came from excavations on the nearby island of Kos, and they date back to the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Hellenistic means the era after Alexander the Great, when Greek culture spread across the eastern Mediterranean. Their placement here was an Italian choice, made to dress the palace in classical grandeur.

Now climb the wide staircase to the upper floor. This is where the second surprise lies under your feet. Many of the rooms have floors decorated with ancient mosaics. These, too, were brought from Kos by the Italians and laid into the new rooms. Look down and you will find geometric patterns, sea creatures, and mythological figures made from thousands of small coloured stones. They are older than the palace by well over a thousand years.

The upper rooms are furnished with heavy wooden chairs, carved chests, and tall cabinets in a Renaissance style. Light comes through deep windows set into very thick walls. In one room you will find a copy of the famous Laocoön statue group, showing a priest and his sons struggling with sea serpents. The original was found in Rome and is linked to sculptors from Rhodes. So the copy here is a small homecoming, of a kind.

The ground floor tells the longer story of the island. Exhibitions here cover ancient Rhodes and medieval Rhodes, from early settlements through the time of the knights. After Italy's defeat in the Second World War, the Dodecanese islands joined Greece in the late 1940s. The palace became a museum. Today it is part of the medieval city of Rhodes, which is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

Before you leave, walk back to the gateway and pause between the two towers. Touch the stone if you can. Some of it was cut by medieval masons, and some of it by Italian workers in the 1930s. The difference is not always easy to see. As you walk down the Street of the Knights, notice how the lane frames the palace behind you. It is a place built by knights, broken by gunpowder, and rebuilt by an empire that did not last.