The entrance to Rhodes harbor is now guarded by two bronze deer. In ancient times, though, a giant statue of Helios, the Sun God, is said to have straddled the harbor. Its size was somewhere between 32 and 40 meters, or up to about 130 feet tall. The bronze and silver statue, the Colossus of Rhodes, was created in 305 BC and is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. An earthquake in 227 BC toppled the statue. The local people, on the advice of the Oracle at Delphi, left the statue where it was. Finally, in AD 654, the huge statue was sold as scrap metal. According to legend, it was then carried to Syria by nine hundred camels. Since then, its whereabouts are unknown.

The bronze deer stag and doe that now guard the harbor represent the unofficial mascot of Rhodes. Deer were brought in 800 years ago to eliminate a snake problem. Now the snakes are gone and the deer are venerated around the town.

Most photographs of Rhodes include some part of its massive city walls around the Old Town, because the walls are everywhere you turn. The Knights of Saint John spent several hundred years strengthening the city's fortifications during their stay in Rhodes. Well-preserved, and restored during the twentieth-century, the walls around the old city span four kilometers (2.5 miles) and are up to forty feet thick in some places. Even so, they weren't enough to keep out the Turks under Suleiman the Magnificent. After a six-month siege, Rhodes fell in 1522. Only 180 of the 650 Knights survived the siege.

This building, now the Archaeological Museum, was once the Hospital of the Knights. As you walk around the Old Town, you see cannonballs everywhere, piled in corners like here in the Archaeological Museum, or even stuck halfway into the thick walls facing the sea.

The Palace of the Grand Masters was the seat for each of the nineteen Grand Masters that oversaw the Knights of Saint John in Rhodes from 1305 until their defeat in 1522. Built in the fourteenth century, its heavy fortifications were to be the final line of defense if the city walls fell.

The Palace itself withstood the siege of 1522 and an earthquake. But in 1856, some ammunition left in a nearby church exploded accidentally, destroying the building.

An extensive twentieth-century Italian restoration has made it possible to see what it looked like during the reign of the Knights. The large rooms of the Palace also provide an excellent opportunity to display several mosaics from Kos, another Dodecanese island that has provided a wealth of ancient artifacts.