Nin. Things to do, map and hidden gems

The Holy Cross is Croatia's most celebrated small church: a pre-Romanesque building of the 9th century on the islet of Nin's old core, which the English architect Thomas Jackson, for its perfect completeness, named the smallest cathedral in the world, and the nickname stuck forever. The chapel of cruciform plan, with a dome and a bell-gable over the entrance, was built without haste and without error: the walls are gently curved, and the openings placed so that the sun enters through them at solstices and equinoxes in exact order, so the Holy Cross reads also as a stone calendar. The lintel carries the carved name of the county prefect Godečaj, the oldest mention of a Croatian dignitary in stone. Inside there is nothing but space and light, and precisely for that the entering works: for eleven hundred years this chapel has stood in the grass, surviving everything history sent. The visit takes ten minutes, the experience longer; loveliest at dusk, when the stone glows and the last light sifts through the little windows. This is one of the places from which Nin begins to be understood: a small town, an enormous history.

St Nicholas on Prahulje is the loneliest and most photogenic chapel of Dalmatia: a Romanesque building of the 11th or 12th century on a regular mound amid the fields between Nin and Zaton, with the toothed crown it received in Turkish times, when it served also as a watchpost. Tradition says that here, within sight of Nin, crowned Croatian kings showed themselves to the people after coronation, so the mound is called the coronation hill too; seven kings, says the story, seven views from the top. History and tradition cannot be separated here, and need not be: the chapel alone, in the grass, without fence or ticket booth, is one of the strongest images of the Croatian coast. One reaches it on foot from the road in five minutes; the door is often locked, but one does not come for the interior, one comes for the whole, a stone cube with a dome on a green mound, the Velebit behind it. The best light is the golden hour: then the chapel lights up like a candle above the field. Join it with Nin into one story: first the smallest cathedral, then the coronation mound, half an hour that explains why this small region is called the cradle of the Croatian state.