Smrdan Grad Fortress with Church of Our Lady, Slivno Ravno

The Smrdan Grad fortress stands above Klek, by the old road that connected the Neretva area with the Dubrovnik coast. It belongs to the municipality of Slivno in Dubrovnik-Neretva County, and is of interest as an example of a fortress built on the border between Venetian and Ottoman rule.

The present fortress has a triangular ground plan, with ramparts about 50 metres long on each side and low bastions at the corners. A wall-walk has been preserved along the inner face of the eastern rampart. It was built at the end of the 17th century, after the Venetians took it over from the Turks around 1689, and the towers of an older medieval fortress were incorporated into the mantle of the ramparts. At the beginning of the 18th century the Church of Our Lady on the Fortress (Velika Gospa na Gradu) was built inside the fortress; its original patron was St Roch. It is a simple single-nave building with a rectangular apse and a bell gable.

The fortress with the church is a protected cultural good, entered in the Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia under the code Z-5833.

Photo: Miroslav Vajdic from Zagreb, Croatia, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.
Data: Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia (Ministry of Culture and Media), Open Licence; coordinates: Wikidata (CC0).