Our Lady of the Rocks

Interesting facts

Art historians nicknamed the church the Croatian Sistine Chapel for its densely painted baroque interior.

The church holds 68 paintings by the 17th-century baroque painter Tripo Kokolja.

Kokolja's largest work in the church, The Death of the Virgin, is about ten metres long.

The venerated icon of the Madonna and Child is attributed to the painter Lovro Dobričević and dates from around 1452.

The whole artificial island covers only about 3,000 square metres, roughly the size of half a football pitch.

The first church on the islet was built in 1630; after an earthquake in 1667 it was rebuilt and reached its present form in the 1720s.

The church has an unusual round bell tower and an octagonal domed chapel added after the 1667 earthquake.

Besides the painted ex-votos, the sanctuary keeps a large collection of silver votive tablets left by grateful sailors and their families.

The sanctuary survived Ottoman and pirate raids, notably in 1624 and 1654, and was damaged again by the great earthquake of 1979.

Why it is worth it

According to Perast tradition, on 22 July 1452 two fishermen came across an icon of the Virgin Mary resting on a rock offshore and took it as a sign — one of them, already ill, reported being cured shortly after. Rather than simply take the icon home, the town decided to build the icon a home of its own: for over five centuries, generations of Perast sailors have returned from voyages carrying stone, and on ships loaded specifically for the purpose have deliberately sunk old and captured vessels onto the same reef, slowly building an artificial island up out of the bay one boatload at a time.

That tradition, called Fašinada, is not a historical footnote — it's still practiced every single year. On 22 July, a procession of boats sails out from Perast and drops stones onto the same spot the original islet grew from, a ritual that has run essentially unbroken since the 1400s and keeps the island technically still under construction after 570-odd years.

Inside the church that eventually rose on the finished island is one genuinely strange object: a large embroidered tapestry made by a local woman, Jacinta Kunić-Mijović, who spent 25 years working on it while waiting for a sailor fiancé who never returned from sea — and who, as her eyesight failed with age, wove strands of her own hair into the piece alongside gold and silk thread. The church-museum also holds a wall of ex-voto paintings, small votive paintings of ships and storms donated by sailors' families over the centuries as thanks for surviving the Adriatic.

Good to know

The islet has no scheduled ferry — visitors reach it by small boat taxi from the Perast waterfront, a short and frequently-run crossing rather than a fixed timetable service.

Getting there

13 km from Herceg Novi. Tivat Airport (TIV) is about 10 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Our Lady of the Rocks is one of the two islets off the coast of Perast in the Bay of Kotor, Montenegro. It is an artificial island created by bulwark of rocks and by sinking old and seized ships loaded with rocks. The Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Rocks is the largest building on the islet, and has a museum attached to it. There is also a small gift shop close to the church and a navigation light at the northern end of the islet.

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