Saint Blaise’s Church, Dubrovnik

This guide to Saint Blaise's Church in Dubrovnik opens with a dream in February 971, when a priest named Stojko heard a stranger's warning inside a chapel: a Venetian fleet at anchor was posing as friends by day while plotting to seize the city by night. The stranger gave his name as Blaise, a healer-bishop from the Armenian mountains, centuries already dead, who had once lived as a hermit tending wild animals and ordering a wolf to release a piglet it had caught. Within years the grateful city put his face on its coins and flew his image from its flag. A Sunday fire later tore through this very building in 1706, threatening everything inside its walls.