Rhodes Jewish Heritage Tour by Car

Meeting at the port

Meeting at Gate A, the main gate of the Rhodes cruise terminal, where your guide and driver are waiting. Please be there ten minutes before the start time.

Mandraki and the new town

Mandraki harbour, where the Colossus of Rhodes is supposed to have stood: a bronze figure of Helios about thirty-three metres tall, one of the seven wonders, which stood for barely fifty years before an earthquake brought it down in 226 BC. Two columns with a bronze deer and doe now mark the entrance, with the fort of St Nicholas and three medieval windmills along the mole.

Panoramic drive

A drive up to the acropolis of Rhodes town on Monte Smith, where the temple of Apollo and the stadium look out over both coasts of the island at once.

Jewish cemetery

The Jewish cemetery, one of the oldest and best kept in Europe, with stones carrying Ladino and Hebrew inscriptions going back centuries.

La Juderia

The Jewish quarter, La Juderia, named in the Ladino the Sephardim brought when Spain expelled them in 1492. The community here was one of the oldest in Greece and numbered some four thousand people before the war. In July 1944 the Germans deported 1,673 of them to Auschwitz; 151 came back. The Square of the Martyred Jews, with its bronze seahorse fountain, is named for them.

Kahal Shalom and the Jewish Museum

Kahal Shalom, built in 1577 and the oldest synagogue in Greece, with a black and white pebble floor and the reading platform in the middle in the Sephardic manner. Next door the Jewish Museum tells the story of the community, street by street and family by family, and holds a Torah scroll some eight hundred years old.

Drive to Lindos

Fifty kilometres down the east coast

Lindos

Lindos, a town that was already trading across the Mediterranean before Rhodes itself existed. Its acropolis stands on a rock 116 metres above the sea, where the Temple of Athena Lindia of the 4th century BC is wrapped inside a fortress the Knights of St John built around it, with a Roman stair and a Byzantine chapel in between. The white village below is a maze of captains' houses with pebble-mosaic courtyards. You also stop at the ceramics workshops the village is known for and at St Paul's Bay, the almost closed inlet where the apostle is said to have landed and where The Guns of Navarone was filmed.

Return to the ship

The drive back along the coast through Faliraki and past the Kallithea spa, an Italian art deco bathing complex of 1929