Early Christian Basilicas

Why it is worth your time

Novalja's early Christian basilicas are the secret history of a place everyone today ties to summer: in the 4th and 5th centuries there stood here a harbour with no fewer than three great basilicas, by which Novalja measured itself against far larger centres of the northern Adriatic. Ships travelling the coast waited here for a favourable wind, and alongside the sailors the church grew too: remains of the basilicas with mosaics, a baptistery and graves have surfaced beneath today's streets and courtyards, so ancient Novalja is viewed in fragments around town. Parts of the mosaics and stone carving are kept in the City Museum and by the remains themselves, and boards at the sites explain what stood where; most famous is the Novalja reliquary, a late antique casket that ranks among Croatia's most valuable early Christian finds.

The viewing is a half-hour walk with eyes for detail: a column fragment in a wall, a mosaic under glass, an apse in a house's foundations. The reward is not spectacle but layering: the knowledge that beneath the summer capital lies a town that received Christianity among the first on the Adriatic.