Šibenik Cathedral

Where it sits. The Cathedral of St James stands on the waterfront square of Šibenik, midway along the Dalmatian coast where the Krka river reaches the sea through a narrow channel. The old town climbs the hill behind it in stepped lanes, so the cathedral is approached either from the harbour, at eye level, or from above, where the roof and dome are seen as a folded arrangement of pale stone slabs rather than tiles. Šibenik itself is the oldest native Croatian town on the Adriatic, first recorded in 1066 in a charter of King Petar Krešimir IV — not a Greek or Roman foundation like its neighbours, but a Croatian one, which locals will tell a visitor within about ninety seconds.

Built entirely of stone. Work began in 1431 and finished in 1536, and the building changed direction halfway through. The first campaign was Venetian Gothic, carried out by a succession of masters. From 1441 the Dalmatian sculptor and architect Juraj Dalmatinac took charge and pushed it toward the Renaissance; after his death in 1473 the Florentine Nikola Firentinac completed the vaults, the transepts and the dome. What makes the cathedral internationally significant is the method. It is built exclusively of stone — no brick, no timber, no mortar binding in the vaults — from prefabricated slabs, ribs and blocks cut to precise profiles and locked together with grooves and tongues, so that the roof, barrel vault and dome are a single self-supporting stone shell. Nothing else in Europe was assembled quite this way, and the interior shows it: the same stone surface runs unbroken from floor to the underside of the dome. UNESCO inscribed the building in 2000.

The faces. Around the outside of the three apses runs a frieze of seventy-one sculpted heads, carved under Juraj Dalmatinac. They are not saints or emperors. They are portraits of fifteenth-century townspeople — a woman with braided hair, a man with a broken nose, a scowl, a smirk, a boy — and the theories about them range from a record of donors to a gallery of citizens who refused to pay. Whatever the reason, the effect is a crowd of individuals set permanently at head height around the back of a cathedral. Inside, the baptistery beneath the southern apse is the other masterpiece: a small domed chamber with a shell-fluted vault, four carved angels supporting the ceiling and a font held up by three putti.

On screen. The cathedral interior served as the Iron Bank of Braavos in the fifth season of Game of Thrones, when the crown's envoys arrive to renegotiate the Lannister debt and are received, with cold courtesy, by the bankers. The production used the stone shell almost unmodified — the bankers sit on a raised bench, the delegation stands below, and the flat grey light off the vault does the rest. The square outside and the surrounding streets carried Braavosi exteriors in the same season. Two things are worth separating from the myth: the Titan that guards the harbour mouth is entirely digital and has no physical original in Croatia, and the House of Black and White, the other Braavosi building visitors ask about, was a set with an exterior filmed elsewhere. Šibenik supplied the bank and the streets, not the whole city.

What you actually see today. The cathedral is entered from the western door on the square; a small charge applies and the interior is bare, cool and unusually quiet for a building of this rank, since Šibenik receives a fraction of the traffic that reaches Split or Dubrovnik. Look for the shell damage repairs: a shell struck the dome in September 1991, during the attack on the town, and the restoration is documented inside. Across the square stand the Renaissance loggia of the town hall, rebuilt after bombing in the Second World War, and the former Rector's Palace, now the city museum.

Getting there and timing. Šibenik sits on the coastal motorway roughly midway between Split and Zadar, about an hour from either by car and a little longer by bus; the bus station is on the waterfront five minutes from the cathedral. The town makes a practical base for Krka National Park, fifteen kilometres upstream. The cathedral has steps at the main portal and a level interior, so access is partial rather than full. Combining the visit with St Michael's Fortress above the town is the obvious plan, and doing so in that order — cathedral first, fortress at sunset — puts the light where it needs to be for both.