Franciscan Monastery (Badija)

The Franciscan Monastery on Badija island, a short boat ride east of Korcula town, is one of the oldest and best-preserved monastic complexes on the southern Dalmatian coast. Badija itself covers 0.97 square kilometres, which makes it the largest islet in Croatia — it falls just 0.03 square kilometres short of the threshold at which it would be classed as an island proper — and it is the biggest of the 19 islands, islets and rocks scattered in the water around Korcula. Its history has been shaped almost entirely by the friars who settled here more than six centuries ago.

How the Franciscans Came to Badija

The island first appears in writing in 1368, when a Korculan clergyman named Vlaho Ivanovic referred to it as the island of St Peter. In 1392 Bishop Ivan of Krk granted land on Badija to Franciscan friars from the Bosnian diocese. Two years later, in 1394, the Korcula municipal council added the bay and the ground around the present monastery, and by 1398 that privilege had been extended to cover the whole island. From the start of the 15th century Badija also served as a burial ground for prominent Korculans: Hranic Dragosevic, one of the builders of Korcula's cathedral, was laid to rest just outside the cloister. The Croatian Renaissance writer Marko Marulic is recorded as having come to the island in search of quiet and contemplation.

The Church and the Cloister

Most of the surviving complex was raised during the 15th century. The main church, dedicated to the Assumption of the Mother of God, was built in the second half of that century in a Gothic-Renaissance idiom, with a single nave under a barrel vault and a facade carrying a rose window above a carved portal. The finest element of the monastery, though, is the square cloister, completed in 1477 and still regarded as one of the best-preserved examples of Dalmatian Gothic anywhere on the Adriatic. A vaulted walkway runs around all four sides, five arcades along the longer walls and four along the shorter ones, opening onto the courtyard through trefoil arches whose columns and capitals carry finely cut foliage.

Inside the church, a marble altar showing the four Evangelists supporting a globe with the figure of Christ is among the pieces still in place, and a further stone altar was carved in 1724 by Vilim Montin in the Venetian manner. Alabaster panels depicting the Passion are said to have been brought to Badija by an English friar named Matthew who left England during the Reformation. The monastery's monumental 15th-century Gothic crucifix, attributed to Juraj Petrovic and long venerated as miraculous, was moved in 1950 to the Church of Our Lady of the Angels near Orebic, where it remains today.

Raids, Wars and Expropriation

Badija's isolation did not spare it. In 1571, in the months around the Battle of Lepanto, an Ottoman fleet attacked and burned the monastery, and in the 1660s pirates out of Ulcinj raided the island, carrying off both valuables and monks. During the Napoleonic period the complex was pressed into secular service: French forces used it as a military hospital between 1806 and 1815, the British then ran quarantine facilities there, and the Franciscans only recovered the site under Austrian rule in 1815. From 1909 the friars ran a classical grammar school on the island, which operated until 1943, when the monks were forced to leave. A military base occupied Badija from 1944 to 1956, the monastery buildings were turned over to sport around 1950, and the island was formally expropriated from the order in 1952. It was not returned to the Franciscans until 2003.

Visiting Badija Today

Badija lies roughly 1.5 kilometres from Korcula town, and water taxis make the crossing in about ten to fifteen minutes, running at roughly half-hourly intervals through the season. A circular footpath about four kilometres long loops the entire island through pine and Mediterranean scrub, and the 16th-century chapel of St Catherine occupies the highest point, its old belfry now serving as a lookout over the channel at sunset. The island's best-known residents are its European fallow deer, introduced in 1958 from Brijuni and now so used to people that they meet arriving boats at the jetty. An art gallery opened inside the monastery in 2019, and the complex itself can be seen by arrangement rather than as a walk-in attraction, which makes it a natural half-day detour for anyone exploring Croatia's coast by boat.