Franciscan Monastery Belgrade
The Franciscan Monastery of St. John the Baptist is a Roman Catholic monastery in the Belgrade district of Zemun .
history
The first Franciscans in Zemun are documented in writing from 1344; but it is assumed that they held a mission in Zemun as early as the end of the 13th century. In 1453, Zemun was destroyed by the Ottomans , which is why the Franciscans left the city for the next 300 years. After the Austrian conquest of Belgrade in 1718, the Franciscans built a monastery in Belgrade, but gave it up when Belgrade fell back to the Ottomans in 1739. They moved to Zemun, where they founded a new monastery between 1750 and 1752. Towards the end of the 18th century, the Zemun city council tried several times in vain to persuade the Franciscans to move out of the city and to convert their monastery into a military hospital. In 1790 the monastery fell victim to a fire caused by a lightning strike. The subsequent reconstruction should take about forty years, the bell tower was built in 1838. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, there were two schools in the monastery, a public one where German was taught and a private one with Serbian and Croatian as the language of instruction. In 1971 the Roman Catholic church province of Novi Beograd was founded, with the Franciscan monastery as the main church. As the attempt to build more Roman Catholic churches in the area of Novi Beograd failed, the ecclesiastical province was dissolved in 2004 and the community returned to the diocese of Syrmia .
Others
The cross of the Franciscans, with which they came to Belgrade in the 18th century, is still in the church. In the 1990s, around 6,000 books and works of art from Vukovar were kept in the Franciscan monastery .
Web links
Coordinates: 44 ° 50 ′ 33 ″ N , 20 ° 24 ′ 40 ″ E