54. Rhodes - UNESCO World Heritage City

We came to see Rhodes because it is a UNESCO World Heritage site and we are interested in history.

From Patras, where the international ferry lands all passengers and vehicles travelling from mainland Europe, we needed to make our way to Pireaus, the port of Athens by way of about 150 km of apparently much improved, but still appalling, road.

Signage is either non-existent or only visible to the initiated.  Driving through the outskirts of Athens was an experience in gasping!

The Greek Blue Star ferry from Piraeus to Rhodes was smaller than the Grimaldi Lines international ship, but with excellent facilities.  It was another overnight trip leaving Pireaus at 7pm and arriving in Rhodes at 8am, with with stops at two islands, Hydra and Kos, during the night.  For this trip we scored the dreaded bunk cabin.

At 8am we had no trouble parking right on the quay in front of the gates to the old walled city of Rhodes.

We planned to have a leisurely look around and then come back in a day or two for a good scrounge around the most interesting places.

Inside the city walls you are bombarded by tourist merchandising and eating and drinking establishments with hustlers out front.  They are all operating from updated, but very old premises, probably always used for similar purposes, but it is all a bit "too much".  So we scurried on to see what else might be on offer.

Rhodes certainly looks different.  While it is known as the city of the Knights Templar and has lots of northern European aspects to it, it is also a city responding to its geographic location, hot and dry, and to the other cultures that have always existed here, Turk, Arab, Greek, and more that I don't know enough about to describe.

This is the oldest street in the old town. All of the buildings on this street were built for or by the Knights Templar at the time of the Crusades in the Holy Land.

The notice announces "Restoration of Ramshackle and Hazardous parts of the Grand Master's Palace in the Medieaval city of Rhodes 2007 - 2013".  So we went looking for these ramshackle parts.

Here is the Grand Master's Palace - looking pretty good at the front.  Sadly the rear was still pretty ramshackle and the scaffolding which was erected there looked as if the money had run out back in 2010.

This building in the street of the Knights Templar and Grand Masters Palace had an intriguing emblem, which I imagined probably served as a clue somewhere in the Da Vinci Code.  It was currently the Italian Embassy.

In the same street, a residence with a cool courtyard.

And at the bottom of the street, a church with a Byzantine look about it, undergoing some repair - the single workman on site gave the impression restoration might take some time.

There were some lovely, more recent buildings like this one with a gentle, Moorish feel.

This ruin at the south end of the town was very old and from a time well before the Knights Templar.

You can see the intense blue of the Mediterranean through the door in the old city wall.

For some reason we didn't "connect" with Rhodes.  Maybe it was the heat and dust, maybe it was the tourists, maybe the business hawkers, or maybe we were just too lazy to make it work - but two hours was enough.  It was back to the little yellow car and off to Lindos.