Church of St Theodore, Okrug Gornji

The church of St Theodore in Okrug Gornji is located on Čiovo, in Split-Dalmatia County. It is interesting to visitors to the island because in a simple Renaissance building it keeps older stone parts, made more than a thousand years ago.

It is Renaissance and single-nave, with a rectangular apse, and oriented east-west. The façade is decorated with a rosette, an arched bell gable and a Renaissance holy water stoup to the right of the main entrance. Inside are three simple masonry Baroque altars. The marble screen panels of the former altar rail, dated to roughly the 10th century, were used as the mensae of the side altars. In the floor of the nave an early modern tombstone with a relief of a sickle, a hoe and a sword stands out. The built-in spolia indicate that the building already existed in the pre-Romanesque period, and the last alterations were made in the Baroque.

The church is a protected cultural good, entered in the Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia under the code Z-4315.

Photo: Arianne Gujinovic Lyon Clark, 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: DGU (centre of the settlement).