Ostrog Monastery
Orthodox monastery built into a vertical cliff face, with two seventeenth-century cave churches.
Ostrog Monastery stands high on the near-vertical face of Ostroška Greda, above the Bjelopavlići plain between Danilovgrad and Nikšić. It was established in the seventeenth century by Vasilije Jovanović, Metropolitan of Herzegovina, who withdrew here and died at the monastery in 1671. Venerated afterwards as Saint Basil of Ostrog, his relics remain in the complex, and the site is the most visited place of pilgrimage of the Serbian Orthodox Church, drawing around a million people each year from several faiths.
The complex has two parts. The Upper Monastery is set into natural caves in the rock and contains the Church of the Presentation, which holds Saint Basil's relics, and the Church of the Holy Cross, frescoed directly onto the stone by the painter Radul in the late seventeenth century. Fire destroyed much of the upper buildings in 1923, but both cave churches survived and the rest was rebuilt by 1926. The Lower Monastery, with the Church of the Holy Trinity of 1824, holds the monastic quarters and pilgrim lodging.
Highlights
- Built into a cliff face roughly 900 metres above the Bjelopavlići plain
- Two cave churches carved into the rock of the Upper Monastery
- Late seventeenth-century frescoes painted on bare stone by master Radul
- Lower Monastery with the Church of the Holy Trinity, built in 1824
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