Chrysa Savvidou

The church of the Panayia Philerimou is situated in an idyllic setting on top of the hill that dominates the bay of Trianda and the town of Ialysos. The location seems to have exercised a great attraction from early times. The same site was earlier occupied by an ancient temple of Athena which, on the arrival of Christianity, was converted into an Early Christian three-aisled basilica with a narthex and a tripartite sanctuary.

The church is well known since it housed a famous object of pilgrimage, the icon of the Virgin of Philerimos. This is an icon of the Virgin and Child attributed by popular tradition to St Luke the Evangelist. The icon was brought to Rhodes in about the 13th century, probably from Jerusalem, and was installed on the Philerimos hill, where it remained until 1523, when the island came into the possession of the Ottoman Turks. It was then taken by the Knights of St John to France and from there to Italy, then Malta and Russia, where it stayed until the 1917 revolution. Since 2002, it has been kept in the Blue Chapel of the National Museum of Montenegro.

In addition to the ancient and Early Christian church, three building phases associated with the Hospitaller period can be detected in the monument. The church was the object of radical restoration work during the Italian Occupation of Rhodes from 1912 to 1948.¹

In 1931 H. Balducci wrote a monograph on the monument in question entitled Il Santuario di Tutte le Grazie sul Filerimo presso Rodi, in which he assigned the first phase to the Hospitaller period in the first half of the 14th c.² This was an aisleless church in which the space was roofed by four cross-vaults with diagonal ribs. At the east is a four-sided sanctuary apse roofed with a vault with diagonal ribs. In the middle of the 19th century the church was in a badly ruined condition and only the cross-vault over the sanctuary was preserved. During the Italian period there were no remains of the rest of the superstructure of this particular phase, since all traces of the rest of the church were destroyed during the excavations undertaken to reveal the Hellenistic temple.

In a second phase, dated to 1450-80,³ two hexagonal chapels were added in contact with the sanctuary apse. An archway was created in the wall shared by the chapel and the sanctuary to serve communications between them. The chapels were roofed by vaults with radiating ribs.⁴ This extension is attributed by Balducci to the need to serve the two creeds that coexisted in Rhodes – the Catholic and Orthodox – particularly at a time when the highly venerated icon of the Virgin of Philerimos was kept in the church.⁵ These chapels had largely been destroyed by the middle of the 19th century, and when the restoration work began, virtually nothing of them was preserved.⁶

In a third building phase, two more chapels were added at the east, in contact with the earlier ones. They have an elongated, five-sided shape and are also roofed with cross-vaults with diagonal ribs.

Particular interest attaches to the north chapel. The ribs of the cross-vault are supported on corbels decorated with the coat-of-arms of the Order of the Knights of St John and the cross of the Grand Master Pierre d’Aubusson (1476-1503). The decorative elements of these coats-of-arms are of no great artistic value and were probably executed by local craftsmen or stone-masons from Crete. The south chapel seems to have been the only one of the two that actually functioned.⁷

Balducci is of the view that the need to create these last two chapels arose after the rest of the church suffered considerable damage, either after the great siege of 1480 or as a result of the major earthquakes of 1481.⁸ The damage to the earlier phase will have led to the construction of two different chapels to serve the two different creeds.

The date of this phase may be determined more precisely, since the coats-of-arms of d’Aubusson assign it to about 1490.⁹ This phase was preserved in better condition than the earlier ones and the first modifications were undertaken by the Italian army in 1919.¹⁰

The work carried out by the Italian engineer Petracco was concerned to reconstruct only the two final cross-vaults towards the east end of the first building phase, in order to make it easier to read the earlier remains of the Early Christian basilica and the Classical temple. The bell-tower with its square ground-plan and circular turrets-balconies at the four corners and a large cross of the Knights of St John was added at this time.

Similarities have been detected between the church and other monuments on the island, mainly in the old town of Rhodes. In his study of the monument, Balducci asserts that it was by way of Rhodes that Western influences reached the architecture of Cyprus, where they can be seen mainly in the churches of Famagusta built at the end of the 15th c.¹¹