Church of the Holy Cross

Why it is worth your time

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.