The pebble floor
Black and white mosaic in the Rhodian manner.
sailko โ CC BY-SA 3.0 ยท Yywilk โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Yywilk โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Yywilk โ CC BY-SA 4.0
A distinctive local tradition called **hochlakia**: floors laid with small black and white sea pebbles set by hand in geometric, floral or symbolic patterns. You find them in the courtyards of houses, churches, synagogues and squares across Rhodes and the Dodecanese, and the craft is handed down. Kahal Shalom has such a floor, as do many courtyards in **Lindos** and in the old town's houses. Watch the ground as you walk in Rhodes โ half its beauty is underfoot.
Yes, and it is among the quietest and least crowded parts of the old town โ the crowd concentrates on the Street of the Knights and Sokratous, while the Jewish quarter sits at the eastern end away from both. You walk narrow lanes past courtyard houses and arches to the **Square of the Jewish Martyrs** (the Square of the Sea Horses, with its bronze fountain), where the memorial carries inscriptions in six languages. โ The quarter is **residential** โ respect its residents' privacy, and remember you are walking somewhere emptied of its people in a matter of weeks in 1943.
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**The oldest surviving synagogue in Greece**: built in **1577** in the Jewish quarter of the old town of Rhodes, it still stands with its floor of black and white pebble mosaic in the Rhodian manner. Rhodes was an important Jewish centre for centuries. **Sephardic Jews** came after the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and settled here under Ottoman rule, speaking **Ladino**, and their quarter was called **La Juderia**. In the early twentieth century Rhodes had around four thousand Jews and six synagogues. In **July 1943** โ after the island passed from Italian to German control โ some **seventeen hundred** Jews of Rhodes and Kos were deported to Auschwitz on a journey by sea and land that took weeks, and only about **a hundred and fifty** returned. It was the furthest point from which Jews were deported to the extermination camps. Today **Kahal Shalom** alone remains of the six synagogues, holding a small museum that tells the story: photographs, records, objects and names. โ A memorial stands in the nearby **Square of the Jewish Martyrs**.
Black and white mosaic in the Rhodian manner.
The Sephardic language spoken in La Juderia for centuries.
Those deported from the island in 1943.
Dosiadou, Jewish Quarter, Rhodes Old Town, 85100 Rhodes