Suleymaniye Mosque, Rhodes

Stand still for a moment at the top of Sokratous Street. Feel the polished cobbles under your feet, worn smooth by centuries of sandals, boots, and handcarts. Behind you, the shop doorways spill out sponges, leather, and the sweet smell of loukoumades, the island's honey-soaked doughnuts. Ahead of you rises a wall of soft rose-coloured plaster, warm against the blue sky. That colour is your first clue. You are standing in front of the Suleymaniye Mosque, one of the oldest Ottoman buildings on Rhodes.

To understand why a mosque stands here, picture this city a little over five hundred years ago. For more than two centuries, Rhodes belonged to the Knights of Saint John, a Christian military order that built the great walls you have walked beside today. In 1522, the young Ottoman sultan Suleiman, later known in Europe as Suleiman the Magnificent, arrived with a vast army and fleet. The siege lasted for months. In the end, the Knights negotiated their surrender and sailed away.

Suleiman marked his victory in a way that rulers of his time often did. He ordered a mosque to be built in the heart of the conquered city, and it carries his name to this day. Suleymaniye simply means the mosque of Suleiman. Tradition holds that the site was chosen near an earlier church, so that the new faith would sit directly on the old. Treat that detail with some caution. It is a widely repeated account, rather than a fully settled one.

Here is the first surprise. The building in front of you is not the one Suleiman saw. The original mosque was replaced in the early nineteenth century, and most sources date the present structure to 1808. So what you see is a later rebuilding on the sultan's foundation. The name, the purpose, and the place stayed the same. The walls themselves belong to a quieter, later chapter of Ottoman Rhodes.

Look now at the colour again. Most of the Old Town is built from honey-gold and grey stone, cut from local quarries and left bare. The mosque stands apart in its painted coat of pink and terracotta plaster. In bright midday sun, it can look almost peach. Late in the afternoon, it turns a deeper red. This contrast is part of why the building is so easy to find. It works like a landmark for anyone climbing the street.

Now let your eyes travel up to the roofline. You will see low, rounded domes rather than a single great dome. This is a modest building compared with the imperial mosques of Istanbul, which carry the same name. It was built for a provincial city, not a capital. The shape is calm and compact. The domes sit close over the prayer hall, keeping it cool in the fierce Aegean summer.

Something important is missing from the skyline, and many visitors never notice. A mosque of this kind traditionally had a minaret, the slender tower from which the call to prayer was sung five times a day. The minaret here was taken down in the twentieth century, because engineers judged it structurally unsafe. So the building now stands without its tallest feature. If you have seen old photographs of the Old Town, you may recognise the thin white tower that once rose above these streets.

Next, look closely at the main doorway and the arcaded porch in front of it. This is the second surprise. The doorway has carved details that look more European than Ottoman, with forms that recall the Italian Renaissance. Many historians believe this portal was taken from an older building from the period of the Knights and reused here. Reusing fine stonework was common practice across the Mediterranean. It meant that one stone doorway could serve two very different faiths over the centuries.

For much of the recent past, the mosque was closed and in poor condition. Damp, age, and earthquakes had weakened the structure. A long programme of restoration has worked to stabilise the walls and repair the interior. Because work like this continues in stages, access inside is not always possible. Many people experience the building mainly from the outside, from the street and the small courtyard. Even from here, the porch and domes tell you a great deal about how it was used.

Before you move on, turn around and look across the narrow street. The building opposite is the Hafiz Ahmed Aga Library, an Ottoman library from the late eighteenth century. It was founded to hold manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish. Together, the mosque and the library show you a small Ottoman neighbourhood that was once centred on faith and learning. Fountains, bathhouses, and schools once sat close by, serving the Muslim families who lived inside these walls.

Under Ottoman rule, the Old Town had a clear pattern. Muslim and Jewish families lived within the walls, while many Greek Orthodox families were expected to live outside them after dark. That arrangement changed over time. Rhodes later passed to Italian rule in the early twentieth century, and then became part of Greece after the Second World War. Today the Muslim community on the island is small. Yet these buildings remain, carrying the traces of several empires in one compact street.

Just a few steps uphill, you can see the Clock Tower, known locally as the Roloi. It rises above the rooftops and helps you place the mosque on your mental map of the Old Town. From the higher ground around it, you can look down over a sea of domes, rooftops, and minarets. It becomes easier to see how many Ottoman buildings still stand here, side by side with medieval chapels and the houses of the Knights.

Take one more look at the rose-coloured walls before you go. Notice how the street noise softens a little as you stand near the porch. Watch the light move across the plaster, and listen for the bells and voices drifting up from the harbour below. When you walk back down Sokratous Street, the shop signs and the crowds will return quickly. But you will know that, at the top of the hill, a sultan's name still marks the spot where one story of Rhodes ended and another began.