Krka Monastery is the best known monastery of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Croatia and it is officially protected as part of the Krka National Park.
The oldest extant mention of the monastery was in 1345, when it is listed as an endowment of princess Jelena Nemanjić Šubić, half-sister of the Serbian emperor Dušan and wife of Mladen III Šubić Bribirski, Croatian duke of Skradin and Bribir. The Catholic monastery was built on top of a Roman site, and Roman burial catacombs exist beneath a part of the church.
The current church of St. Archangel was erected in 1422 on the location of an earlier Gothic structure. Ottoman Turks devastated the church around 1530 but it was restored on several occasions. Other monastery buildings (18th–19th century), the church, and the bellfry are situated around a rectangular cloister with arcades.
In mid-17th century monks were forced to flee from the Ottomans and found shelter in Zadar, where pope Innocent X in 1655 gave them two churches, that had previously been in possession of Franciscans of the Third Order, named 'Glagolitians' (glagoljaši) . In a subsequent agreement with the Franciscans, the monks declared that they 'live in the service of the Greek Church, the old illyrian language.'
After Operation Storm in 1995 the monastery was looted, but not significantly, as it was protected by the Croatian authorities, abandoned, and the seminary shut down and relocated to Divčibare and, later, Foča. The monks returned in 1998, however, and the seminary reopened in 2001.
The belltower of this monastery was built in the Romanesque style. The complex also includes a chapel of Saint Sava built in the 19th century, under the tutelage of the Serbian Orthodox Bishop of Dalmatia Stefan Knežević, as well as a new building of the seminary and an additional dormitory building. The monastery has its archives and a library with a variety of ancient books and valuable items from the 16th to the 20th century, a collection of wooden icons (St. John the Baptist from the 14th or 15th century, work by the so-called Master of the Tkon Crucifix), silverware and embroideries.
References:Saint-Georges de Boscherville Abbey is a former Benedictine abbey. It was founded in about 1113 by Guillaume de Tancarville on the site of an earlier establishment of secular canons and settled by monks from the Abbey of Saint-Evroul. The abbey church made of Caumont stone was erected from 1113 to 1140. The Norman builders aimed to have very well-lit naves and they did this by means of tall, large windows, initially made possible by a wooden ceiling, which prevented uplift, although this was replaced by a Gothic vault in the 13th century. The chapter room was built after the abbey church and dates from the last quarter of the 12th century.
The arrival of the Maurist monks in 1659, after the disasters of the Wars of Religion, helped to get the abbey back on a firmer spiritual, architectural and economic footing. They erected a large monastic building one wing of which fitted tightly around the chapter house (which was otherwise left as it was).