Franciscan monastery
About the place
The monastery used to stand on the western approach to the city, but it was moved due to security reasons. The monastery and the church within the city walls began to be built in 1317, and most of the work was completed in the 14th century. The side of the church looks towards Stradun. The door of the church is vaulted with a gorgeous Gothic portal, which was the only one that was preserved in the catastrophic earthquake of 1667. The portal is the work of local stonemasons, the Andrijić brothers, from 1498. The central one is the stone Pieta. The cloister with 120 columns from 1360, which bears the features of late Romanesque (column capitals) and Gothic (thin proportions of columns and other elements), was built by Mihoje Brajkov from Bar, and surrounds the oldest garden in Dubrovnik, which has been continuously maintained since the monastery was moved within the city wall. A pharmacy, the third oldest in Europe, has been operating within the monastery since 1317. Until 1901, it was located in a small cloister north of the large one, and today it is to the left of the entrance to the monastery. In the fire after the Big Cherry in 1667, about 7,500 volumes of books and manuscripts in the monastery library disappeared. It was renovated with the passion of the monks and today it preserves more than 70 thousand works, of which about 20,000 manuscripts, with 206 particularly valuable incunabula. The library also has extensive materials of great importance for the history of older Croatian literature. The library preserves the oldest Croatian library record in the form of a book with a list of materials from that time and one of the two surviving copies of the first edition of Marulić's Judita. The music part of the library preserves many works of old Croatian composers with more than 100 world uniques. The museum's collection includes paintings by old masters such as the Dubrovnik painter Lovro Dobričević, the original pharmacy inventory and goldsmith's items.
Good to know
Many well-known people from Dubrovnik, such as Miha Pracat and Marojica Kaboga, are buried within the monastery.