Gate of Agia Aikaterini (St. Catherine), aka the Gate of the Mole

A historical source of the year 1357 has it that the construction of the Gate of St. Catherine was commissioned by Grand Master Dieudonné de Gozon (1346-1353). The construction has been referred to as the Gate of St. Catherine since 1465 whereas before that it used to be designated as the “Gate of the Mole”, a name due to the fact that this Gate actually opened on the thoroughfare running through the centre of the Medieval City and all the way to the commercial harbour. As a matter of fact, this is one of the earliest constructions forming part of the fortification of the city, quite typical of the architectural influences of Provence, similar to the case of the Arnaldo Gate. As the case was for the Gate of Agios Ioannis (St. John), raw material taken from ancient constructions – namely, the mole and the Hellenistic ramparts – was used for the construction of the Gate of St. Catherine.
East of the Gate there was arranged an emplacement that covered the range all over to the Mole of the Windmills; that emplacements was decommissioned already in the 15th century. It was most probably over that same period, at the time of the refurbishment projects commissioned by Grand Master Orsini (1467-1476), that a staircase over which access was allowed to a seaside road running around the city, was eliminated. In 1944, the City of Rhodes suffered an air-raid by the Allied Forces, resulting in the razing of the harbour and its infrastructure, along with a sizeable part of the city’s urban tissue. Ever since, the Gate of St. Catherine has remained off-limits although works are presently under way for the reinstatement of this monument.