Pilgrimage Sites in Croatia

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.