Saint Chrysogone Church

Saint Chrysogone Church is a majestic example of the use of Romanesque architecture in Croatia’s cultural heritage and demonstrates the cultural heights attained in the city of Zadar in the twelfth century.

The church and the bell tower are today the only parts remaining from the great Benedictine abbey that once stood. Consecrated to saint Chrysogone, whose relics at Zadar were mentioned by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in his work De administrando imperio, the first abbey was built during the high Middle Ages on the site where the ancient emporium stood near the maritime entrance to the city. It was the first Benedictine abbey in Dalmatia, and the central seat for the male cenobite monasteries in the region of Zadar.

The church standing today was built in the second half of the twelfth century. The first archbishop of Zadar, who also directed the building of Zadar Cathedral, consecrated it in 1175.

Saint Chrysogone Church is a basilica with three apses orientated towards the East. Two colonnades divide the church’s interior into three naves, whose sides are surmounted with small galleries that open onto the central nave. The column shafts, and some of the capitals have been reused from antique buildings, while the medieval capitals are imitations of the Corinthian style. The church’s interior was decorated with mosaics and frescos, whose remains can still be seen in the three apses. The sanctuary houses a Baroque altar created in 1701 by the Venetian sculptor, Alviso Tagliapietra.

The decorations on the façade are relatively simple. The main entrance dominates the lower part, with semi-circular lunettes surmounted with a pediment supported at the time by two columns flanking the door. The upper section of the façade is adorned with small niches.

The south wall bordering one of the city’s main roads is richly decorated in blind arcades with cable-moulded half-columns supported at their bases.

The three semi-circular apses are the church’s main decorations. Two lateral apses, which are smaller than the central apse, contain under their roofs a decoration composed of blind semi-circular arches above a small window. The main apse is decorated with blind arches in the lower part, while the upper part is perforated with a small gallery with semi-circular arches supported by small columns with small cubic capitals.

Several of this church’s decorative and architectural characteristics are present on Zadar Cathedral. They can also be seen on contemporary Romanesque architecture or slightly earlier architecture in the Adriatic Basin, and especially in Italian towns like Pisa, Lucca, Parma, and Ancona.

During the medieval era, the abbey housed a scriptorium where numerous illuminated manuscripts and charts were copied. Zadar archive today houses all the documents that came from this abbey, including 600 parchments, and some fragments of liturgical texts with neumes dating from the eleventh century. The abbey was refitted and converted in the nineteenth century, when the complex, given the small number of abbeys at the time, changed its function and became one of the places for the activities of the University of Zadar. It was seriously damaged during the Second World War, but the abbey’s remains can still be seen from the northern side of the church.