The Place

The island was populated by ethnic groups from the surrounding nations, including Jews. Under Ottoman rule, they generally did fairly well, but discrimination and bigotry occasionally arose. In February 1840, the Jews of Rhodes were falsely accused of ritually murdering a Christian boy. This became known as the Rhodes blood libel.

Austria opened a post-office at RHODUS (Venetian name) before 1864,[23] as witnessed by stamps with Franz-Josef head.

In 1912, Italy seized Rhodes from the Turks during the Italo-Turkish War. The island’s population thus bypassed many of the events associated with the “exchange of the minorities” between Greece and Turkey. Due to the Treaty of Lausanne, the island, together with the rest of the Dodecanese, was officially assigned to Italy. It became the core of their possession of the Isole Italiane dell’Egeo.

Following the Italian Armistice of 8 September 1943, the British attempted to get the Italian garrison on Rhodes to change sides. This was anticipated by the German Army, which succeeded in occupying the island. In great measure, the German occupation caused the British failure in the subsequent Dodecanese Campaign.

On 19 July 1944, the Gestapo secret German police rounded up the island’s nearly 2,000 Jewish inhabitants to send them to extermination camps. About 160 of the island’s more than 600 Greek Jews survived. The Turkish Consul Selahattin Ülkümen succeeded, at considerable risk to himself and his family, in saving 42 Jewish families, about 200 persons in total, who had Turkish citizenship or were members of Turkish citizens’ families.

On 8 May 1945 the Germans under Otto Wagener surrendered Rhodes as well as the Dodecanese as a whole to the British, who soon after then occupied the islands as a military protectorate.

In 1947, together with the other islands of the Dodecanese, Rhodes was united with Greece.

In 1949, Rhodes was the venue for negotiations between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, concluding with the 1949 Armistice Agreements.

Cuisine

Pitaroudia, traditional food from Rhodes and Dodecanese.
Local specialities of Rhodes include: Avranies, Koulouria, Pitaroudia, Pouggia, Tsirigia, Fanouropita, Katimeria, Melekouni, Pouggakia, Takakia, or Mantinades, and muchalebi.[citation needed]

In popular culture
In ancient times there was a Roman saying: “Hic Rhodus, hic salta!”—”Rhodes is here, here perform your jump”, an admonition to prove one’s idle boasts by deed rather than talk. It comes from an Aesop’s fable called “The Boastful Athlete” and was cited by Hegel and Marx.
The name of the US state of Rhode Island is based on a reference to Rhodes by Italian explorer Giovanni Verrazano. In a 1524 letter detailing his excursion into the waters around either Block Island or Aquidneck Island Verrazano wrote that he ” “discovered an Ilande in the form of a triangle, distant from the maine lande 3 leagues, about the bignesse of the Ilande of the Rodes”.
Lawrence Durrell’s Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953) is the author’s semi-autobiographical account of his stay on the island after World War II.
In the PlayStation 2 game God of War II, both Rhodes and the Colossus of Rhodes are featured at the start of the game, offering a mythological theory as to how the Colossus was destroyed. The Colossus of Rhodes is a common feature in many games, for example, it can be built as a “Wonder” in Rise of Nations and the Civilization series of games.
In one book of the Roman Mysteries series of children’s novels by Caroline Lawrence, the main characters visit Rhodes to stop the trading of slave labour.
Cinema
Movies filmed on the island include:

They Who Dare
Surprise Package (film)
The Guns of Navarone
Kiss the Girls (1965 film)
Signs of Life (1968 film)
Escape to Athena
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2