Gradina and the Church of St John the Baptist, Tinj

At the Gradina site in Tinj, in the area of the Town of Benkovac in Zadar County, layers of several millennia are stacked on a single hill. It is interesting to visitors who want to see how a prehistoric settlement, a medieval fortress and a parish church follow one another on the same spot.

The oldest layer is a Liburnian settlement from prehistory, and the walls and numerous movable objects found show that life at this location continued into Roman times. Fragments of church furnishings decorated with interlace suggest that a pre-Romanesque church also stood here. A medieval fortification of rectangular shape came later, of which a tower with a square ground plan remains. Against its east wall is built the facade of the parish Church of St John the Baptist, consecrated in 1852. It is a single-nave longitudinal building with a sacristy on the east, shallow niches on the side walls and a portal in the middle of the south wall.

The site is a protected cultural property, entered in the Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia under the code Z-3023.

Data: Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia (Ministry of Culture and Media), Open Licence; coordinates: DGU (centre of the settlement).