Churches of St Anthony the Abbot and St Roch, Vrisnik

On a height on the northern edge of Vrisnik, in the municipality of Jelsa on the island of Hvar, stand the parish church of St Anthony the Abbot and the little church of St Roch. The path to the church is paved with stone cobbles and lined with an avenue of cypresses, so the walk to it is pleasant in itself. The place belongs to Split-Dalmatia County.

The parish church came into being by the merging of two churches, dedicated to St Anthony the Abbot and St Catherine, built at the end of the 14th or beginning of the 15th century. In the middle of the 18th century their vaults were demolished and the space was covered by a single pointed vault with transverse ribs. In 1874 the sanctuary was demolished and a large chapel with a sacristy was built. Construction of the bell tower began in 1803, and it was only completed on the eve of the Second World War. The little church of St Roch with a wooden statue of the saint was built in 1857 by Baron Ivan Grgičević because of a vow of the people of Vrisnik during the cholera. To the east is the cemetery, walled in 1889.

The complex is a protected cultural good, entered in the Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia under the code Z-4944.

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).