The Tower of St John

The 1996 study — undertaken specifically because acute structural danger at this complex called for shoring and restoration, and accordingly combining documentary, heraldic and archaeological evidence with a full structural survey — describes the Tower of St John as “perhaps the most characteristic nodal point for the identification of transitional defensive forms” in the whole Rhodian enceinte: a judgment framed by the authors’ own direct structural survey of the fabric, and the basis this document uses for an Exceptional representativeness rating, not awarded lightly.

By the decisive Ottoman siege of 1522, the Tower of St John was, per the dedicated academic study, one of at most three land gates on the landward defences still operational, and was “regularly in the thick of the fighting.” The city’s capitulation later that year is attributed in the same study not to any structural failure of defences such as this one, but to the exhaustion of the defenders’ gunpowder.

This document draws principally on the 1996 study, supplemented by Katerina Manousou-Ntella’s 2013 doctoral dissertation and her related 2007 book chapter on the medieval gates of Rhodes town. Two of these three sources share a lead author — Katerina Manousou-Ntella and Manoussou-Della are the same scholar, her name appearing with both transliterations across her publications — and so do not constitute fully independent corroboration in the strictest sense. Her sustained, multi-decade, structurally-grounded study of this one monument nonetheless represents an unusually deep evidentiary base by the standards of this project.

The source document’s own table of contents lists further subsections — on the Grand Master’s Garden, the bastion as a heritage landscape today, Ottoman repair and nineteenth-century damage, a 2000–2015 restoration programme, the bastion’s functional reintegration, and a 2011–2015 restoration culminating in a 2017 Europa Nostra award — none of which appear in the body text supplied for this document. This Statement is built from the text actually delivered, and notes the gap rather than inventing the missing narrative.

I was born in the year 1421, out of a block of pale Rhodian stone, on the highest ground anyone could find at the southern edge of a walled town by the sea. A man named Antoni Fluvian made me. He was the Grand Master of a whole order of warrior-monks called the Knights of Saint John — and he had big plans for the little town of Rhodes. He raised me up as a tall, square tower, open at the back like a cupboard with no door, so that if an enemy ever somehow got inside me, my own friends on the wall could still see straight through. Over my front door he carved his own coat of arms, so everyone would know who had built me. And right beside it, he carved a picture of a man with wild hair and a cloak made of animal skin: Saint John the Baptist, the patron saint of the whole Order. That is where I got my name. I am the Tower of Saint John.

I did not know it yet, but I would spend the next eighty years growing up. First came Jean de Lastic. He built a wall across my open back and fitted it with a spiked iron gate called a portcullis, which could drop down like a row of teeth to block anyone from getting through. People started calling that gate the Porte Bolevert. Lastic also built me a twin — a second tower just to my west, wearing his own coat of arms instead of Fluvian’s.

Then came Jacques de Milly, who finished the whole stretch of new wall around us in the year 1457. The stonemasons were so proud of their work that they carved an inscription into the stone, naming the master builder himself: Manolis Kountis. You can still read his name today, carved in two languages, nearly six hundred years later.

Then came Ramon Zacosta, who wrapped a five-sided wall called a bulwark around me, with little platforms partway up for soldiers to stand on with their crossbows and early guns. Zacosta’s bulwark was so wide that anyone wanting to reach my front gate could no longer walk straight at me — they had to detour around, which is exactly what Zacosta wanted. A tower that is hard to even walk up to is a tower that is hard to attack.

Then came Giambattista degli Orsini, who finally joined me to the rest of the great wall with a two-storey platform built for cannons, arching right over the top of Lastic’s old gate passage. For the first time since I was built, I was not standing alone anymore. I was part of something enormous.

In the summer of 1480, a vast army arrived by sea. Tens of thousands of Ottoman soldiers surrounded Rhodes, dragging cannon taller than houses, determined to take the city by force. I watched, and I waited, and I listened to the thunder of their guns — but that time, the worst of the fighting happened somewhere else, at a fort called Saint Nicolas, guarding the harbour, and at another tower by the windmills. Those two held firm under bombardment so fierce it amazed everyone who saw it, and the invaders finally sailed away, defeated.

The Grand Master who led that victory, a knight named Pierre d’Aubusson, understood something important: cannon were going to change everything about how walls needed to be built, forever. So afterward, he came to me. He wrapped me in an enormous new outer wall called a bastion, thick enough to shrug off cannonballs, with a brand-new outer gate, a drawbridge, and a stone bridge crossing a deep new ditch. He even turned my old front wall into a gun platform of my own. I had grown from a single lonely tower into a small fortress in my own right.

Two more Grand Masters kept working on me after that. Emery d’Amboise built a little guardhouse beside my gate. And Fabrizio del Carretto, the last to work on me, thickened my walls even further and reinforced the stone ceiling of my chapel so it could bear the weight of all the earth now piled on top of it for the cannon to stand on. In the year 1520 — just two years before I would need it most — a builder named Basilio dalla Scuola came and made his own final repairs to my gun openings, so they could fit the newest, most powerful cannon of the age.

Nobody told me so in words, but by then I understood. I had not been built to look beautiful, though I was. I had not been built to be tall, though I was that too. I had been built, stone by stone, gift by gift, for eighty years, by seven different men who would never meet each other, for one single reason: because someday, someone was going to try to break through me, and when that day came, I needed to be ready.

The day came in 1522. Suleiman the Magnificent, the most powerful sultan the Ottoman Empire had ever had, brought a force so large that the old soldiers of 1480 would hardly have believed it. This time, his engineers studied the walls of Rhodes carefully first — and they picked me.

By then, I was one of only three gates in the whole landward wall still strong enough to be useful at all. The old stories written about that siege say plainly that my post “was regularly in the thick of the fighting.” I do not need to exaggerate what that meant. Cannonballs struck my walls so often that, centuries later, archaeologists digging inside my oldest breastwork — the very first stones Fluvian ever laid — found a pile of stone cannonballs still sitting exactly where they had struck, half-buried in the rubble, waiting for someone to find them.

Soldiers fought and bled at my gate for months. The ground in front of me shook from gunpowder mines dug under my walls by enemy sappers, and from the counter-mines the knights dug back to stop them. Through all of it — everything that eighty years of seven Grand Masters had built into me — I held. I did not fall. Not one stone of me gave way to the enemy. And yet the city fell. But I am still here.

So, the next time someone tells you that a thing took too long to build, or that growing stronger takes too many small steps, you can tell them about me. It took eighty years and seven different builders, none of whom lived to see the day it would matter, to make me strong enough for one single night in 1522. And when that night came, I was ready.