ABSTRACT
The “unidentified church on Kisthiniou Street” is incorporated in the eastern part of the Hospitaller enceinte of Rhodes, near the Acandia Gate. It is a single-aisled, barrel-vaulted building whose apse is part of the city wall (Fig. 1). It was already shown as a ruin in an 1828 engraving when Rottiers, a Belgian traveller, identified it with Santa Maria della Vittoria, a church built by Grand Master Pierre d’Aubusson to honour the Virgin for her assistance in repulsing the Turks in the 1480 siege of Rhodes. 1 This identification was more or less forgotten by scholars when Albert Gabriel, in his monumental architectural study of medieval Rhodes, adopted another ruined church in the neighbourhood as Aubusson’s dedication. 2 However, recent re-examination of the problem in the light of new discoveries, including several fragments from an early fifteenth-century gravestone on the site favoured by Gabriel, tips the argument against his choice: if in the early fifteenth century this church was already in existence, it cannot have been built by Aubusson. 3
