CHAPEL OF ST. JEROME IN ？TRIGOVA – SOUL SAVING PILGRIMAGE SITE OF FREDERICK OF CILLI

Sa？etak Scholarly discussion on various issues related to St Jerome and his cult, including the age-old question of his birthplace, was recently revitalized following the publication of the translation of Josip Bedekovi？’s eighteenth-century monograph on the ‘Illyrian’ Doctor of the Church. This question has indeed intrigued various authors for quite some time, and we will try to offer some answers with respect to the rise of St Jerome’s cult in medieval ？trigova, a purported place of his birth, and to explain initial phases of the process which eventually included ？trigova into the relatively large group of places along the borders of Roman provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia. In 1447 Freiderick of Cilli built a chapel dedicated to Saint Jerome in ？trigova and later strove to establish it as a pilgrimage site. He soon received a papal bull which recognized ？trigova as the birthplace of the Saint. Only after these mid-fifteenth-century events took place, ？trigova started to appear in numerous narrative and cartographic sources as his birthplace, a tradition still cherished today. Narrative sources tell us that ？trigova was one of the centres of Glagolitic priests, who would have surely made the connection between the toponym ？trigova and Roman Stridon and we will, thus, focus on the role of this group in the establishment of both Jerome’s cult in ？trigova and the place’s identification with Jerome’s hometown of Stridon