Landmarks

• Museums of Rhodes
• Butterfly Watching
• Kalithea Thermi
• Sound & Light Show
• Colossus of Rhodes
• Ancient Kameiros
• Rhodini

Museums of Rhodes

Hydrobiogical Station of Rhodes **AQUARIUM**

The Rhodes Aquarium (as it is usually called) is one of very few aquariums of any note in Greece and is run by the National Centre for Marine Research. This is why it attracts every year 200.000 visitors from all over the world to view its exhibits and the variety of species .

The Station came into existence during the Italian occupation of Rhodes, and its Art-Deco-inspired exterior and interior have been preserved as a historic landmark.

Initiating its activity by 1937 as the “Reale Instituto di Recerche Biologiche di Rodi”, the station was handed to the Athens Academy after the liberation of the Dodecanese islands and their reunion with Greece. Since ten it operates as a peripheral station of the Greek Hyrobiogical Institute.

The Hydrobiogical station of Rhodes can be divided into three sections, the Aquarium, the Museum and the Reaserch Department.

The Aquarium, one of the very few existing in Greece, located in the Stations' basement hosts in its 40 tanks of 80,000 litres total capacity - a multicoloured population of interesting Mediterranean invertebrate and vertebrate marine species such as sea anemones and plants, urchins, algae, corals, bivalves, lobsters, octapuses, numerus fish, sea turtles etc.


The Archeological Museum of Rhodes

This museum is housed in the medieval building "Hospital of the Knights". The building was begun on the insistence of Grand Magistrate Antoine Fluvian three years following his death (ca. 1460) to be completed in 1489, when Grand Magistrate was Pierre d' Aubusson. The building consists of two floors, with an internal yard. In the six rooms of the museums and the garden interesting finds, deriving from all periods of the islands history, are exhibited.

The museum houses funeral finds (vases, statuettes, jewellery and metal artifacts) from ancient Ialyssos and ancient Kamiro (Geometric period), while others date from the archaic and classical periods, as for example the collection of sculpture, inlaid floor sections and stellae on the graves of knights. Some of the most significant exhibits include:

• Two headless Kouroi (statues of young men) from the archaic period (550-530 B.C.)
• Grave stellae of Krito and Timarista (420-410 B.C.)
• Grave stele of Kalliarista (ca. 350 B.C.)
• Marble statue of nude, squatting Aphrodite (ca. 100 A.D.)
• Kylix of Vroulian style Rhodian workshop. (6th c. B.C.)


• Marble statue of nude, squatting Aphrodite (ca. 100 A.D)

• Grave stele of Kalliarista (ca. 350 B.C.)

• Headless Kouros (statues of young men) from the archaic period (550-530 B.C.)


The Municipal Gallery

The Rhodes Municipal Gallery houses an authoritative collection of modern Greek art, covering the period from 1860 to 1950. The Gallery was inaugurated in 1962 by Andreas Ioannou, a student of modern Greek painting, who was Prefect of the Dodekanese at the time.

The Gallery today houses one of the most representative and authoritative collections of 20th-century Greek painting. It offers a unique opportunity to study the development of Greek art throughout the last century and to discover the particular responses of Greek artists to its crises and challenges.

The Municipal Gallery of Rhodes hosts works of K. Maleas, G. Bouzianis, F. Kontoglou, Theofilos, S.Vasiliou, N. Hadzikyriakos - Gikas, Y. Spyropoulos and other prominent Greek artists, and is an invaluable experience for the scholar of Modern Greek painting. Today the Gallery hosts 690 exhibits but only 90 are available to the public disposal.

The paintings exhibited are changed in regular intervals. The organization of specific exhibitions and other artistic events in various buildings of the Medieval town is also among the activities of the Municipal Art Gallery.

Some of the most important exhibits of the museum are: Theophilos: The hero of the Greek War of Independence, Miltiades Yataganas. Y. Tsarouchis, Chief of patrol. Glues on cloth.

Open daily except Sundays 08:00-14:00, 2 Symi Square, Old Town, Telephone 2241023766