Byzantine Church of St. Spyridon

Rhodes' Old Town is full of buildings that have been more than one thing, but few make the point as compactly as Hagios Spyridon. Standing on Athenas Square, well inside the walls, it is a modest Byzantine church of the 13th century that spent nearly four centuries as a mosque, sits on a Hellenistic foundation, and today functions as an ordinary working parish church. Four cultures occupy the same small footprint, and the seams between them are still visible.

Three Buildings on One Footprint

Excavation and restoration work carried out in 1984 established the sequence. The oldest layer is a Hellenistic three-aisled structure; on its ruins a church was raised in the 13th century, in the Byzantine period before the Knights of St John took control of the island. That first church contributed the semicircular arch over the sanctuary and the marble inlay floors, along with an initial programme of wall painting.

Then, in the 16th century, a second church was built directly on top of the first rather than replacing it. The arch and part of the earlier decoration were kept and new murals were added, which is why the interior reads as a single small space carrying paintings of noticeably different dates. The Knights had held Rhodes since 1309 and turned the town into one of the most heavily fortified places in the Mediterranean; this rebuilding belongs to the closing decades of their rule.

Andreas, Georgios and the Crypt

The most important surviving painting dates to the early 16th century and shows the Virgin Mary with Saint John, flanked by two men standing in an attitude of prayer. Inscriptions beside them give their names as Andreas and Georgios, understood to be father and son, who paid for part of the decoration and were later buried in an underground crypt below the floor. Donor portraits of this kind are common enough in Orthodox churches, but named ones tied to a securely dated scheme and an associated burial are a good deal rarer, and they anchor the building to identifiable people rather than to an anonymous congregation.

Mosque, Minaret and Return

Rhodes fell to Suleiman the Magnificent in December 1522 after a siege of roughly six months, and the Knights sailed for Malta. As happened elsewhere in the town, the church was converted for Muslim worship under the name Kavakli Mescidi, and a minaret was raised at its northwest corner. That minaret still stands complete, which is unusual, since most of the town's converted churches lost theirs. The conversion also did the frescoes an accidental favour: covered over for centuries, they were shielded from light, smoke and well-meaning repainting.

The building came back into Christian use around 1912, when Italy took the Dodecanese from the Ottomans, and was rededicated to Saint Spyridon. It now belongs to the Metropolis of Rhodes and serves an active congregation.

The Saint and the Streets Outside

Spyridon himself had no connection with Rhodes. Born in Cyprus in the late 3rd century and a shepherd by trade, he became bishop of Trimythous and attended the First Council of Nicaea in 325, where he argued against Arianism. His relics were carried west after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and now rest in Corfu, of which he is the patron saint, and his feast falls on 12 December.

The church stands a few minutes' walk from the main tourist arteries of the medieval town, which UNESCO inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1988, and it is usually quiet even in August. From Athenas Square the lanes lead out toward Mandraki and the commercial harbour, where visitors arriving on a Rhodes gulet cruise come ashore, so folding a look inside into the walk between the two costs almost nothing.