I have a view controller called vc0 which is presented like this:
[self presentViewController: vc1 animated: YES completion: nil];
And in vc1 I
[self.navigationController popViewControllerAnimated:YES];
did the trick for me also. In my case, I had a (iPhone) viewController that was pushed on to the stack using a push segue. Since the viewController that was initiating the segue had a navigation bar, I had to send the parent controller's navigationController the popViewControllerAnimated message instead of calling it's own dismissViewControllerAnimated:completion message.
Ray