Franciscan Monastery and the Old Pharmacy

About this place

It stands at the very start of the **Stradun**, just inside the Pile Gate, and holds something rare in the world: a **pharmacy working since 1317**, among the oldest operating pharmacies on earth. The friars founded it to serve the whole city rather than the monastery alone — a striking decision in the fourteenth century — and it still dispenses medicine today from a window onto the street. The monastery museum holds its old vessels, scales and manuscript recipe books. Its loveliest feature is the fourteenth-century **Romanesque cloister**: a square courtyard ringed by sixty double columns, each capital carved differently — human faces, animals, foliage — so that no two repeat. A fountain and orange trees stand at its centre, and the silence is complete though the Stradun roars metres away. The cloister survived the **1667 earthquake** that destroyed Dubrovnik, making it one of the few surviving pieces of the medieval city. The library holds thousands of manuscripts and early printed books. ⚠ It is the quietest refuge in a crowded old town — go in when the crush becomes too much.