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Rhodes

1100 BC When the Mycenaean war was over, Dorians come to Rhodes and set up three city-states - Lindos, Ialysos and Kamiros which later united with other Doric cities, Kos, Knidos and Halicarnassos, to form the "Doric Hexapolis" (a federation of six cities).

Its economy and culture continued to flourish until the 3rd century B.C., and was the predominant power in the Aegean. A thousand years later in 1309, it fell into the hands of the Knights of St. John, and became the center of power, symbolized by its magnificent mediaeval town and the imposing castle and palace of the Grand Masters.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a great bronze statue, erected in about 280 BC by the citizens of Rhodes, capital of the Greek island of the same name. It represented their sun god Helios and was said to be 105 feet high, and weighed 225 tons. According to legend, it straddled the harbour entrance, but it is more likely that it stood to one side. The statue was toppled over by an earthquake in 224 B.C. It is said that an Egyptian king offered to pay for its reconstruction, but the Rhodian's refused. They feared that somehow the statue had offended the god Helios, who used the earthquake to throw it down. Nearly a thousand years later, in AD 656, a Muslim dealer bought the fragments as old metal and carried them away to be melted down. However, the old engraving of the Colossus of Rhodes is purely imaginary and is based on the legend that the statue stood astride the harbour’s entrance.

Under the Roman Empire Rhodes enjoyed a measure of nominal independence. In 395 AD, after the division of the Roman Empire, Rhodes was attached to the Byzantine Empire. It remained under Byzantine control until 1309, the Knights of St John of Jerusalem was occupied. In 1522, after a bloody Turkish siege led by Suleiman I, the knights were forced to evacuate the island. Turkish sovereignty over Rhodes lasted until 1912, when it was occupied without resistance from the Turkish troops, by the Italian army. After the II World War ended, the island was liberated from the defeated Italians by the Greek and other Allied Army Forces and united with Greece in 1947.

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