What was once the main harbor, in use since the 5th century BC, adjoins the commercial harbor on the east side of Old Town and is home to the city's municipal buildings and a picturesque former open-air market, built by the Italians, that now houses multiple cafés, souvlaki restaurants, and souvenir stores. It makes for a pleasantly twinkly walk at twilight hours, where you can people-watch those hopping between the various merchants dotted up and down the harbor and market. Day-trip cruisers, scuba dive boats, and charter yachts are the only vessels that sail from here now, but it was once one of the busiest ports of the Hellenic world. Two bronze deer statues mark the spot where legend says (wrongly) that the city's famous Colossus, a huge bronze statue of the sun god, Helios, once straddled the Mandraki Harbor entrance. Completed by the sculptor Chares of Lindos in the late 3rd century BC, the 110-foot-high figure only stood for around 50 years. In 227 BC, an earthquake razed the city and toppled the Colossus. After the calamity, the Delphic oracle advised the Rhodians to let the great Colossus remain where it had fallen. So there it lay for some eight centuries, until AD 654 when it was sold as scrap metal and carted off to Syria, allegedly by a caravan of 900 camels. Archaeologists now reckon its true location was next to the Palace of the Grand Masters.
