Church of St Michael of Lažani and Krug Tower, Kaštel Kambelovac

Above Kaštel Kambelovac, in the town of Kaštela in Split-Dalmatia County, on a rocky height of Mount Kozjak called Krug, stand the Church of St Michael of Lažani and a watchtower. The site is of interest to hikers and lovers of antiquities, because it combines medieval religious and defensive heritage in one place, along with a wide view from the crag.

The church is a single-nave building with a semicircular apse, built in the Romanesque style and laid out in an east–west direction. It once served as the parish church of the medieval settlements at the foot of Kozjak, and it is mentioned in historical sources as early as the 12th century. Late medieval tombstones lie scattered around it. At the very end of the projecting crag, south-west of the church, stands a tower with a circular plan built of roughly dressed stone. It dates from the 15th or 16th century and is today the only surviving tower on Kozjak from the time when the border between Venetian and Turkish territory was determined by the peaks of this mountain range.

The church and tower are a protected cultural property, entered in the Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia under the code Z-4317.

Photo: Argo Navis, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.
Data: Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia (Ministry of Culture and Media), Open Licence; coordinates: Wikidata (CC0).