Church of St George at Vršina, Podstrana

The little stone church of St George is located in Donja Poljica, above Gornja Podstrana, at the top of a mountain pass. It is interesting to hikers and lovers of antiquities because from there the coast and the approach to the hinterland were watched over.

The church is surrounded by a thick dry-stone wall of unworked stone forming a circular courtyard, and about twenty graves can be seen in the enclosure. It is a small, elongated rectangular chapel with a gabled stone roof and a pointed, irregular vault. To the east extends a semicircular stone cairn, and such embankments beside hillforts run along the whole mountain ridge. The church was built in the pre-Romanesque tradition. Churches like this were built at prominent places as boundaries of old village communities, and this one also shows that the place was sacred since prehistory.

The church is a protected cultural good and is entered in the Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia under the code Z-6851.

Photo: Zrinka Radunić, CC BY-SA 3.0 hr, Wikimedia Commons.
Data: Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia (Ministry of Culture and Media), Open Licence; coordinates: DGU (centre of the settlement).