Croatian protoromanic
‘Croatia and its eastern coast touched by the Adriatic, its provinces, villages, farms and cemeteries, has a great number of small late-medieval churches, built in many different shapes. Historians place them in the period from the early 9th century to the late 11th century – the era of the autonomous paleocrat state. This dating is based on reliable historical sources or characteristic styles, or sometimes only on analogies or presentiment. The first works of Croatian sacred architecture are from the dawn of the 9th century. Quantitatively numerous and very different in terms of their characteristics, these forms of pre-romanic architecture developed uninterruptedly throughout the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. Spanning three hundred years, these buildings represent a constitutive part of Croatian history, from the first autonomous principa-lities to the time of the last king of national origin (end of the 11th century). Pre-romanic buildings show the link between space and time, between environment and construction techniques. The environment is an organised space. The environment can be identified in the church. The orientation transfers the features from the place to the structure. The positions of certain geographical elements, the inclination of the sun to the horizon and the deviations and angles of the sunlight, are all integrally transposed in the way the elements are organised. The church building takes into consideration the geo-astronomical factors of a particular place. The environment includes the complex of the church inside the cosmic mechanism of the place on which the object is erected. The work is a symbol, open to all the historical events. It introduces us to the truth of its own language. Architecture allows a strong relationship between shapes and contents. The language of architecture lives throughout time and shifts its historical time to our present times. As a work of art, it turns transitory time into fixed time and changes chance into system. Mladen Pejakovic’