A village built around a monastery
Sveti Petar u Šumi, “St Peter in the Forest”, grew up around its monastery. The first community here was Benedictine. When it faded, Emperor Frederick III handed the abandoned site to the Paulines, the “white friars”, in 1459, and they rebuilt it.
The monastery was burned during the Uskok War in 1616 and rebuilt from the mid-17th century. Its church of Saints Peter and Paul was re-consecrated in 1755 behind a new Baroque facade, with an interior that is rare in Istria. A painting of Our Lady of Częstochowa on the main altar, said to have wept on Christmas Eve 1721, made the village a place of pilgrimage. The Paulines returned to the parish in 1993.
A Way of the Cross fits naturally into this landscape: a village that has drawn pilgrims for three centuries, surrounded by oak forest and old paths.
An old devotion
The Way of the Cross, Via Crucis or Križni put, follows Christ’s last walk from his sentencing to the tomb. It began with pilgrims in Jerusalem retracing the route on foot. Europeans who could not travel there built copies at home: chapels, carved stations and painted panels set along a path or around a church, so the walk could be made anywhere. Over time the number of stations settled at fourteen.
Here, the stations are told in stone alone, without figures.
