St. Euphemia Church

Rovinj's Old Town occupies what was, until 1763, an island, cut off from the Istrian mainland by a narrow channel that was finally filled in that year. At the highest point of that former island stands the Church of St Euphemia, a Baroque building whose bell tower is visible for kilometres out at sea and which acts as the visual anchor of the whole town. It is dedicated to Euphemia of Chalcedon, a saint who, in local tradition, arrived in Rovinj by sea, and whose feast day on 16 September remains the town's principal religious holiday.

The Saint and the Sarcophagus

Euphemia came from Chalcedon, on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus opposite Byzantium, and tradition names her as the daughter of a senator called Philophronos and his wife Theodosia. She was put to death during the Great Persecution under Diocletian after refusing to take part in sacrifices to the god Ares; the governor Priscus is named as the man who condemned her, and she is said to have died of wounds inflicted by a bear in the arena. The date is conventionally given as 304 AD. A church was raised over her tomb at Chalcedon, and when the Persians overran the region around 620 her relics were carried across the water to Constantinople; the greater part of them is kept today in the Church of St George in Istanbul.

Rovinj's version of the story picks up from there. In the town's telling, the marble sarcophagus holding the saint's body vanished from Constantinople and drifted west, washing up on the Istrian shore in the year 800. The townspeople could not shift the enormous stone box up the hill: teams of oxen failed, and only a young boy with two calves is said to have managed to haul it to the summit, which was read as a sign that the saint had chosen the spot herself. Later centuries added further episodes, with the relics reportedly seized by the Genoese, lost by them to the Venetians, and returned to the town only in the fourteenth century. The sarcophagus is still inside the church, and it is the reason the present building exists on such a scale: the church was rebuilt specifically to house it.

The Largest Baroque Church in Istria

Rovinj spent more than five centuries under Venetian rule, from 1283 to 1797, and the church reflects it. An older and smaller building had stood on the hilltop above the remains of early Christian structures, dedicated first to Saint George, then jointly to George and Euphemia, before Euphemia alone became the patron. Work on the replacement began in the 1720s, drawing on a design by the Venetian architect Giovanni Scalfarotto, and was carried through to completion by the architect Giovanni Dozzi in 1736. It is generally described as the most important example of Baroque church architecture on the Istrian coast and the largest Baroque church in the region, measuring roughly 51 metres long and 30 metres wide, with a central nave rising about 17.7 metres and side aisles of about 10 metres. The church was granted the honorific title of insignis in 1747 and solemnly dedicated in 1756. Its facade came much later, built in the 1860s to a design by the Rovinj architect Giacomo Depozza, with the date 1861 carved into the lintel above the main doors.

The Bell Tower and Its Turning Saint

The bell tower predates the church by decades. Construction started on 7 October 1654 to the design of the Milanese architect Alessandro Manopola, on the site of a smaller ruined tower; the work then passed through several hands before another Milanese builder, Cristoforo Bellan, brought it to completion in 1687. At around 60 metres it is one of the tallest campaniles in Istria, and it is openly modelled on the campanile of St Mark's Basilica in Venice, an architectural statement about which republic Rovinj belonged to.

What crowns it is more unusual. A statue of St Euphemia 4.7 metres tall, worked in sheet copper by the Vallani brothers' workshop at Maniago, was raised into place on 11 June 1758, replacing an earlier figure destroyed by lightning. It sits on a rotating shaft designed by the Rovinj craftsman Simone Battistella, so the saint turns with the wind and doubles as a weathervane. Locals have long read the next day's weather from the direction in which her outstretched arm points.

Inside the Church, and Visiting Today

The interior is arranged as a nave with two aisles, lit largely through the windows of the side chapels. Its marble altars were produced between 1739 and 1741 by the Venetian Tagliapietra workshop: the figure of St George on the high altar is the work of Alvise Tagliapietra and his son Ambrogio, and the same workshop supplied sculpture for the altar of Our Lady of the Rosary and for the altar of St Euphemia. The stuccowork and the choir stalls date from 1750, the organ from 1754, and a silver antependium from 1776. Alongside these the church keeps Gothic statuary from the fifteenth century and paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, among them a Last Supper and a Christ in Gethsemane.

The church remains an active parish within the Diocese of Poreč and Pula and the centre of Rovinj's celebrations every 16 September, when the town fills for the patron saint's day. Outside services, the main draw for visitors is the climb up the bell tower, made on wooden stairs and rewarded with a view over the terracotta roofs of the Old Town, the harbour and the islands scattered offshore. After the climb down, many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Croatia coast, since the waterfront sits directly below the hill and most of the islands visible from the tower are within easy reach by boat.