Manastir Gradiste

Manastir Gradište stands on a hillside in the village of Kaluđerac, around seven kilometres east of Petrovac and overlooking the Buljarica bay. Tradition places…Manastir Gradište stands on a hillside in the village of Kaluđerac, around seven kilometres east of Petrovac and overlooking the Buljarica bay. Tradition places the founding in 1116, with the first documentary mention in a 1305 charter of King Milutin recording that Queen Jelena had gifted it to the Monastery of the Holy Virgin of Ratac, after which Gradište operated as a metochion of Visoki Dečani in Kosovo. The complex is enclosed by defensive walls with gunports and includes a dormitory and an active graveyard.

The site holds three churches in total. The main Sveti Nikola dates to 1610, with an interior fully covered by a fresco cycle dated early seventeenth-century, including a Saint George cycle attributed to the school of Strahinja of Budimlje, that forms the monastery's principal artistic draw. Uspenje Bogorodice carries frescoes dated to the 1620s. The third church Sveti Sava is variously dated to the early 1500s or 1855, with an iconostasis painted in 1864 by the Greek icon-painter Nicholas Aspiotis. Other treasures include 18th- and 19th-century iconostases, an unusual icon of Saint Christopher with an animal head, and the manuscript of the first Serbian spelling book, copied here by monks Stefan and Sava. The monastery was extensively reconstructed after WWII damage and again following the 1979 earthquake.