Kymisala

On the west coast of Rhodes, near Vasilika, stands a watchtower from the closing decades of the Knights Hospitaller's rule. Built in 1476, it forms part of a broader defensive programme undertaken after two shocks to Christian power in the eastern Mediterranean: the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the destructive Mameluk raids on Rhodes from Egypt in 1440 and 1444. The Knights, anxious about the growing Ottoman threat, reinforced existing island fortifications and raised new ones, of which this is a well preserved example. Its rectangular plan is strengthened by bastions, and it remains one of the better surviving monuments of the Ioannite period on Rhodes. The tower's position on the coast suggests it served to watch for seaborne attack and to signal warnings inland. Today it stands as a quiet, sturdy relic of a tense era, its masonry still telling of the military architecture of the order.