Krka Monastery: A Serbian Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Centre in Croatia
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Croatia
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Serbian
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Monastery
On this page17 sections
History
Krka Monastery is a Serbian Orthodox monastery in Croatia, located in the Krka River valley about 3.5 kilometres east of Kistanje. Its Eastern Orthodox foundation dates no earlier than the 1570s, although the site had earlier Christian and Roman phases. Under the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Eparchy of Dalmatia, it became the principal spiritual and cultural centre of Orthodox Dalmatia.
Early traditions and the sixteenth-century foundation
The monastery’s original foundation date and institutional identity remain uncertain. Serbian Orthodox tradition attributes its establishment in 1345 or 1350 to Jelena Nemanjić Šubić, a Serbian princess by birth and a member of the Šubić family through marriage. She was the sister of Emperor Dušan and the wife of Mladen III Šubić Bribirski. The same tradition assigns an enlargement to 1402. Bishop and historian Nikodim Milaš introduced this account into modern historical writing in 1901, but no earlier documentary evidence for it has been identified.
The earliest known written reference to a Christian church or monastery at the site dates from 1458 and mentions a monk named Pahomije. An Ottoman census from 1550 records the Church of Saint Michael. Archaeological and documentary evidence places the establishment of the Orthodox monastery around 1577 or later, while its existence can be established with certainty from the middle of the seventeenth century. A late medieval Catholic church or monastery may have occupied the site before the Orthodox foundation. Similar Gothic stonework at Krka and at the Church of Saint Mary and Franciscan monastery at Bribir has led to a reasoned archaeological hypothesis connecting the earlier site with the Šubić family.
The tradition of a 1402 rebuilding was strengthened by an inscription that was later exposed as a forgery. Its original date was 1702, but it was altered or fabricated in 1859 by Archimandrite Jerotije Kovačević. Another alleged inscription dated 1422 originally carried the date 1782. These discoveries undermine the medieval dates traditionally assigned to the monastery’s enlargement.
Centre of Orthodox Dalmatia
The restoration of the Peć Patriarchate in 1557, a revival of the historic Serbian Orthodox patriarchal institution, strengthened the organization of Serbian Orthodox communities in the Ottoman-era Balkans. Orthodox communities in Dalmatia were then administered by the Metropolitans of Dabar and Bosnia. In 1578, Metropolitan Gavrilo Avramović appointed Krka’s abbot as exarch, an administrator acting on behalf of a higher church authority, for the entire Dalmatian Orthodox Church.
Krka thereafter served as the centre of Dalmatian Orthodoxy until 1810. Through its abbots, many of whom acted as deputies of diocesan bishops, the monastery also became the formal spiritual seat of Orthodox Dalmatia. Monks from Dragović Monastery, destroyed during Ottoman incursions, and from the devastated Krupa Monastery found refuge at Krka.
During the Cretan War, the conflict between Venice and the Ottoman Empire that affected the eastern Mediterranean and Adriatic world, Ottoman forces attacked and plundered the monastery in 1647. Its clergy entered Venetian service, while monks and local inhabitants fled to Venetian Dalmatia. Part of the monastery was renovated in 1660, followed by extensive rebuilding between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.
Education, scholarship, and later history
Krka’s role extended beyond worship. A school for clergy opened there in 1615 and was described as the oldest Serbian school for educating priests. It closed, relocated, and reopened at different times, including a period in Zadar. The Seminary of the Three Holy Hierarchs, named for Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom, resumed activity during the twentieth century. It operated as a two-year school from 1964 and was formally established in its present form in 1966 through the efforts of Bishop Stefan.
After the foundations of a new seminary building were consecrated in 1985, construction began. The seminary was moved to Divčibare and later Foča during the wars of the 1990s, then returned to Krka in 2001. In 1999, the monk Fotije from Kovilj Monastery was consecrated Bishop of Dalmatia. His efforts helped restore the Seminary of the Three Holy Hierarchs at Krka. Bishop Stefan Boca and Bishop Nikolaj Mrđa were also associated with the monastery’s spiritual revival after the Second World War.
From the 1960s, the monastery hosted annual gatherings of local Serbs and Croats. Political changes after 1989 and the formation of the Serb Autonomous Area of Krajina were followed by the Croatian military operation known as Operation Storm in 1995. The monastery was looted afterward, although protection by Croatian police limited the damage. The monks returned in 1999, and the seminary reopened at the monastery two years later.
Krka also functioned as a scribal centre and as a place where Serbs from Dalmatia held discussions and reached agreements. Its archives preserve documents in Old Church Slavonic, Greek, Latin, Italian, German, and other languages. Nikodim Busović, an Orthodox ecclesiastical official who opposed union with the Catholic Church after the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699, eventually settled at Krka after periods of exile on Mount Athos and in Palestine. He was buried at the monastery in 1707.
Serbian Patriarch Dimitrije visited Krka in 1926, followed by Alexander I Karađorđević in 1929. An information plaque in the courtyard commemorates their visits. The monastery is protected within Krka National Park and is registered as protected cultural property of the Republic of Croatia.
Remains
Krka Monastery occupies a layered archaeological site in Carigradska draga, within the Krka River canyon or valley. The complex was built over an ancient Roman site and contains evidence of activity from the Roman period to the present. The Church of Saint Michael the Archangel, monastic buildings, a bell tower, chapels, educational buildings, burial areas, and underground remains are arranged across the property.
Church and earlier sacred structures
Church of Saint Michael the Archangel
The Church of Saint Michael the Archangel has a rectangular plan, a dome, and a long, irregularly shaped narthex, an entrance or antechamber attached to the main church. Its altar area was enlarged and does not have a semicircular apse. Architectural and archaeological research identifies three principal building phases, a late medieval phase, a phase in the second half of the sixteenth century, and a final phase that began in the 1780s.
The lower portions of the narthex walls preserve evidence of a late medieval structure. Later work produced the barrel-vaulted narthex, the domed nave, and an altar constructed during the second half of the sixteenth century. A profiled Gothic frame with the remains of a rosette was found beneath cement mortar in one wall. Its form closely matches a frame and rosette at the Church of Saint Mary and the Franciscan monastery at Bribir, indicating that the pieces may have come from the same workshop in Zadar or Šibenik.
Cave, graves, and older church
A cave beneath the altar contains an elongated space with graves cut into its floor. Tradition identifies it as the place where the Apostle Paul preached Christianity. Beneath the southern part of the present large church lies an older single-nave church, apparently connected with a hermitage. The hermitage indicates that Orthodox monks were practising asceticism at the site by the seventeenth century.
Monastic buildings and courtyards
Bell tower and cloister
A Romanesque-style bell tower stands within the monastery complex. It was built at the end of the eighteenth century. The church, the bell tower, and other monastery buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are arranged around a rectangular cloister, a covered passage surrounding an open courtyard, with arcades. The monastery buildings began to rise during the second half of the sixteenth century and received eight additions and seven upgrades through the 1980s.
Chapels and seminary buildings
The complex includes the nineteenth-century Chapel of Saint Sava, built under the patronage of Bishop Stefan Knežević. A new seminary building and an additional dormitory form part of the later educational complex. The seminary buildings reflect the monastery’s continuing role in the education and training of Orthodox clergy.
Archaeological remains and burials
Early Christian catacomb
In the northeastern part of the monastery property, a rock-cut early Christian catacomb contains numerous graves. The site also preserves Roman stones, Roman and late medieval graves, artefacts, and buried walls. The ground plan indicated by the buried walls was considerably larger than that of the present monastery.
Monastery cemetery
The monastery cemetery contains the graves of former abbots, monks, and bishops. These burials form part of the complex’s continuing religious history and its physical record of ecclesiastical leadership.
Treasury and library
Treasury
The treasury began to form with the monastery’s foundation and contains more than 2,000 exhibits and objects. Its holdings include fifteenth- and sixteenth-century pieces, icons with Venetian-made silver coverings dated 1765, an epitrachelion associated with Saint Sava, fragments of relics associated with several saints, and other ecclesiastical valuables. An epitrachelion is the long vestment worn around the neck by an Orthodox priest or bishop during liturgical services. The treasury also preserves an Oktoechos printed by Božidar Vuković in Cetinje in 1494. An Oktoechos is an Orthodox liturgical book arranged according to eight musical modes. Conservation and restoration have included the revision, conservation, and repair of icons from the collection.
Library
The library was established with the monastery and contained more than 4,000 books in an inventory made in 1965. Its holdings include more than fifty manuscript books dating from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, as well as handwritten and printed ecclesiastical books, works in foreign languages, periodicals, calendars, newspapers, and reports.
The Mokropolje Gospel Book is one of the library’s major manuscripts. Written on parchment in the tradition of the Old Serbian language, it dates from the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century. Other notable holdings include Božidar Vuković’s 1536 Miscellany, printed on parchment and described as the only known miscellany printed on that material, and the 1346 “Bulgarian” Patericon, whose binding bears an inscription identifying it with Hilandar Monastery. The collection also contains works by Dositej Obradović, Vuk Karadžić, Nikodim Milaš, and Serbian Metropolitan Mihailo Jovanović. A substantial part of the library and treasury was moved to Serbia during the 1990s.
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