St. Blaise's Church

St. Blaise's Church sits on Luža Square, right next to the Sponza Palace and just off the Stradun, dedicated to the man Dubrovnik has treated as its protector for over a thousand years. According to legend, in 971 a fleet of Venetian ships anchored outside the city walls under the pretext of restocking supplies, while secretly scouting the city's defences for a surprise attack. St. Blaise is said to have appeared to a local priest in a vision, warning him of the plot; the city armed itself in time, the Venetians backed off, and Dubrovnik began honouring St. Blaise as its patron saint the following year, in 972.

The church standing today is not the original medieval one — that building survived the 1667 earthquake but burned down in a fire in 1706. The current church, built between 1706 and 1715 by the Venetian architect and sculptor Marino Gropelli, was modelled on Sansovino's church of San Maurizio in Venice, in the Baroque style. Its facade, split by four Corinthian columns and topped with statues by Gropelli himself, shows St. Blaise at the centre holding a model of the city, flanked by figures representing Faith and Hope.

The one thing that made it through the 1706 fire is the church's most treasured object: a 15th-century gilt-silver statue of St. Blaise, still holding a model of the earlier Romanesque church that had stood on the same spot before the 1667 earthquake destroyed it. It is now the centrepiece of the Baroque high altar.

Every year on 3 February, the church is at the centre of the Festivity of St. Blaise — a procession of clergy, banner-bearers in folk costume and city officials that has been running in some form since the Middle Ages and was added to UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2009. The night before, church bells ring across the city and white doves are released, and locals line up for the traditional "blessing of the throat," a tradition tied to a legend that St. Blaise once saved a choking boy with a fishbone stuck in his throat.

The church still holds regular services and is a popular choice for weddings, but for most visitors it is simply one more striking stop on a walk through the Old Town before heading down to the harbour for an afternoon exploring the coast by boat from Dubrovnik.