Croatia Pilgrimage Destinations

On 15 July 1684 the parish priest of Marija Bistrica reached into a cavity behind his altar and drew out a blackened wooden statue that had been walled up there for 134 years. The Crna Majka, the Black Mother, made this village beneath Medvednica the most visited shrine in Croatia; half a million pilgrims arrive each year. John Paul II celebrated Mass there on 3 October 1998 and beatified Cardinal Alojzije Stepinac before 500,000 people — the largest gathering in Croatian history.

The faithful of Karlovac dedicated a small wooden chapel to St. Joseph on his feast day in 1687. It grew into the National Shrine of St. Joseph, whom Croatia's bishops chose as protector of the nation, and the city around it was laid out in 1579 as a six-pointed star fortress against Ottoman expansion. On 9 November 1391 the Croatian priest Nikola Tavelić was put to death in Jerusalem with three companions for refusing to renounce his faith; Paul VI canonised him in 1970 as the first Croatian saint, and his native Šibenik holds the national shrine in his honour. The city's Cathedral of St. James, built entirely of interlocking stone without mortar or brick, entered the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2000. A frieze of seventy-one sculpted heads — portraits of fifteenth-century townspeople — looks out from its walls.

Above Rijeka, the Franciscans have kept the hilltop shrine of Trsat since 1468. Tradition says the Holy House of Nazareth rested here in 1291 before passing on to Loreto, and in 1367 Pope Urban V sent the Croatian pilgrims the icon of the Mother of Mercy that still stands above the high altar — the heart of the oldest Marian shrine in Croatia. In the Podravina plain, Ludbreg keeps the relic of a Eucharistic miracle that tradition dates to 1411, when a doubting priest found blood in his chalice; Pope Leo X approved its public veneration in 1513, and the Diocese of Varaždin calls Ludbreg the only Eucharistic shrine in Croatia. Inland from Split, the Franciscan basilica of Sinj holds the painting of Our Lady of Sinj, carried out of Rama in Bosnia in 1687 and credited with the town's deliverance from the Ottoman siege of August 1715; on the Assumption, pilgrims from across Dalmatia walk to her, many of them barefoot.

Across the border in Bosnia and Herzegovina lies Medjugorje, where six young people reported seeing the Virgin Mary in 1981 and where the Vatican has authorised pilgrimage. Split Airport is about 140 kilometres away, coaches run from Split's bus station, and the waymarked Camino Dubrovnik walks there in seven stages from the church of St James in Dubrovnik to the church of St James in Medjugorje.