Zadar Cathedral

Stand still for a moment on the pale stone of the old town. The paving under your feet is smooth, almost polished, worn down by centuries of shoes. Gulls call somewhere over the harbour. And in front of you rises a tall façade of cream-coloured limestone, with round windows that catch the Adriatic light. This is the Cathedral of Saint Anastasia, the largest church in all of Dalmatia, the long coastal region of Croatia.

Locals call it Sveta Stošija, their own name for Saint Anastasia. She was an early Christian martyr. Her story belongs to the fourth century, a time when Christians in the Roman world could still face execution for their faith. How did her remains end up here, on the Croatian coast? That journey is one of the quiet surprises of this building. It ties a small Adriatic city to the court of a distant emperor.

In the early ninth century, Zadar's bishop was a man named Donatus. He travelled on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the old Roman world. According to the traditional account, the emperor gave him the relics of Saint Anastasia as a gift. Donatus brought them home. Ever since, the saint has been the protector of the city, and her remains are kept inside this church.

The building you see today is not the first church on this spot. Long before it, an early Christian basilica stood here. A basilica, in this sense, is a long hall with a central aisle and side aisles, a plan the Christians borrowed from Roman public buildings. And beneath even that, there was Roman Zadar itself. The cathedral sits right beside the old Roman forum. So the ground you are standing on carries layer after layer of the city's past.

Now look closely at the façade. Its style is Romanesque, the round-arched architecture of medieval Europe before the pointed Gothic style arrived. You can see rows of small blind arches running across the front, like a stone lace. There are two rose windows. The lower one is larger and simpler. The upper one is more delicate, with finer tracery. That difference is a small clue. It shows that the front was built over a long period, as tastes slowly changed.

The main construction belongs mostly to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But this was not a peaceful time for Zadar. In 1202, the army of the Fourth Crusade attacked the city. Here is a surprise for many visitors... these were Christian crusaders, and Zadar was a Christian city. The crusaders were working with Venice, Zadar's great rival on the Adriatic. The siege caused heavy damage, and the rebuilding of the cathedral carried on for many decades afterwards.

Step inside, and the temperature drops. The air smells of cool stone and old wax. The interior is long and calm, with a tall central nave and lower aisles on each side. The columns are not all the same. Some were reused from older buildings, perhaps even from Roman Zadar. Let your eyes travel slowly along them, and you will start to notice small differences in colour, stone and carving.

Walk towards the altar. Above it stands a ciborium, a stone canopy on columns that shelters the altar, a feature common in medieval churches of the region. It dates from the Gothic period of the fourteenth century. Behind the altar, in the apse, the curved end of the church, there are traces of older wall painting. Look also for the carved wooden choir stalls, where the clergy once sat to sing. They are the work of the fifteenth century, and the wood is dark and richly worked.

In the left aisle, look for the chapel of Saint Anastasia herself. Her relics rest in a stone sarcophagus. Tradition links this sarcophagus to Bishop Donatus, the same man who brought the relics home. It is a quiet corner. People often stop here, light a candle, or simply stand for a minute. Even if you are not religious, it is worth pausing to feel how long this city has kept faith with one saint.

Now step back outside and look up at the bell tower. It stands apart from the main church, a common arrangement in this part of the Mediterranean. Work on it started in the medieval period, but it stayed unfinished for centuries. It was only completed in the late nineteenth century, to a design by the English architect Thomas Graham Jackson. So the tower you see is part medieval, part Victorian... and it blends together more smoothly than you might expect.

If you have the energy, the tower can usually be climbed. The stairs are narrow and steep, and they tighten as you rise. But at the top, the reward is wide. You see the red roofs of the old town, the round church of Saint Donatus right next door, the harbour, and the islands lying low on the sea. From up here, you understand Zadar's shape — a narrow peninsula, almost surrounded by water.

The twentieth century brought new wounds. During the Second World War, Zadar was bombed heavily, and much of the old town was destroyed. The cathedral was damaged, and its nearby baptistery was largely ruined, then later rebuilt. When you walk these streets, some buildings are old, and some are careful reconstructions. The cathedral survived as one of the anchors of the city's memory. In 2003, Pope John Paul the Second visited Zadar, a moment many local people still remember.

Before you leave, stand once more in front of the façade. Notice how the light moves across the limestone as clouds pass over. Listen to the sounds of the square — footsteps, voices in Croatian and a dozen other languages, perhaps a bell from the tower above you. As you walk on towards the forum or the sea, look back once. The two rose windows will still be watching over the street, as they have for more than seven hundred years.