We walked off the ship straight through the Marine Gate and stepped directly into 1309 — the year the Knights of St. John arrived after losing Acre to the Mamluks. For 213 years they held this island fortress, turning Rhodes into Christendom's easternmost shield. I stood in the same gate where those warrior-monks once stood watch, and the weight of that history pressed down like a physical thing.

The Street of the Knights took my breath away. This isn't a museum piece — it's the real thing, cobblestones polished smooth by seven centuries of feet, the coats of arms of France, Spain, Auvergne, and Provence still carved into stone inns where actual knights slept between battles. The narrow lane runs uphill toward the Palace of the Grand Master, and walking it feels like trespassing through time. These walls withstood the Sultan of Egypt in 1444, turned back Mehmet II in 1480, and only fell to Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522 after a brutal six-month siege. The stones remember.

The Palace of the Grand Master crowns the Upper Town — a 14th-century fortress built on foundations that might have held the Colossus itself, that Wonder of the Ancient World that stood for only 54 years before an earthquake brought it down in 226 BC. I climbed the ramparts at golden hour (special ticket required, absolutely worth it) and had four kilometers of medieval walls nearly to myself. The fortifications divide the town just as they did when knights ruled the heights and merchants worked the Lower Town below — Gothic arches bleeding into Ottoman domes, Crusader and Turk woven into the same ancient stones.

UNESCO called this the largest inhabited medieval town in Europe when they designated it a World Heritage Site in 1988, and they weren't exaggerating — 6,000 people still live inside these walls, hanging laundry from Gothic windows, parking scooters against Hospitaller buttresses. It's alive in a way most fortress-cities aren't.

We took a taxi south to Lindos in the afternoon — pure white sugar cubes tumbling down to an impossibly blue bay. The Acropolis rises above it all, accessible by donkey or determined feet (we chose feet, felt it earned). From the top, the view spun me dizzy — turquoise water, Paul's Bay curved like a comma, the tiny village impossibly far below. We ate lunch at Mavrikos in the square afterward — octopus stifado that fell apart at the touch of a fork, local wine that tasted like bottled sunshine and island stone.

The pros: medieval atmosphere so thick you half-expect armored knights around every corner, history you can touch with your bare hands. The cons: cruise crowds mid-day can pack the Street of the Knights shoulder-to-shoulder, but they thin dramatically after 4 p.m. when most ships sail. Stay late if you can — the Old Town belongs to you then.