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:The Clementinum is a historic complex of buildings in Prague. Until recently the complex hosted the National, University and Technical libraries, the City Library also being located nearby on Mariánské Náměstí. The Technical library and the Municipal library have moved to the Prague National Technical Library at Technická 6 since 2009. It is currently in use as the National Library of the Czech Republic.
Its history dates from the existence of a chapel dedicated to Saint Clement in the 11th century. A Dominican monastery was founded in the medieval period, which was transformed in 1556 to a Jesuit college. In 1622 the Jesuits transferred the library of Charles University to the Klementinum, and the college was merged with the University in 1654. The Jesuits remained until 1773, when the Klementinum was established as an observatory, library, and university by the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.