The replica in place
Set exactly where the original slab lay in the floor.
Roberta F. — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Roberta F. — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Sibinia — CC BY-SA 4.0
A small plain Romanesque church in a farming valley behind Baška, with nothing in its appearance to suggest its importance — yet it is **where the most significant stone in the history of the Croatian language was found**. It was built in the eleventh century for a Benedictine monastery, a modest structure of local stone with a timber roof. In the nineteenth century it was noticed that one of its floor slabs — which people had been walking on — was inscribed. That slab is the **Baška tablet**: a text in the **Glagolitic** alphabet of around **1100**, recording a grant of land from King **Zvonimir** to the monastery. Its importance is threefold: **the oldest substantial text in the Croatian language**, the first mention of a Croatian king''s name **in Croatian**, and one of the most important Glagolitic inscriptions anywhere. Note: **the original is not here.** It was moved in **1934** to the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in **Zagreb**, where it is displayed. What you see in the church is an **exact replica** set in its original position. Note: the church is very small and the visit short, usually combined with a Baška day.
Set exactly where the original slab lay in the floor.
Eleventh century, plain local stone with a timber roof.
Quiet farmland behind crowded Baška.
Jurandvor, near Baška — about 38 km from Krk town
**The oldest known Slavic alphabet**, devised in the ninth century by the brothers **Cyril and Methodius** to translate religious texts into Slavic. Its letters resemble neither Latin nor Greek nor Cyrillic — it is an entirely independent system. It spread first in Moravia and Bulgaria and was then **displaced by Cyrillic** across most of the Slavic world within two centuries. But it survived on the **Croatian coast** — on Krk, in Istria, the Kvarner islands and Dalmatia — and stayed in use in the church and in documents **into the nineteenth century**, its longest survival anywhere. The reason was a rare privilege: the Pope permitted this region''s church to celebrate mass in **Church Slavonic** rather than Latin, an exception granted nowhere else in western Europe. ⚠ That is why Glagolitic inscriptions appear on church stones across Krk, Brač and Istria.
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