Franciscan Monastery and Old Pharmacy

The Franciscan Monastery stands at Placa 2, immediately inside Pile Gate at the western end of the Stradun in Dubrovnik, Croatia. The Franciscans moved inside the city walls in the 14th century, having earlier lived outside them, and the complex grew around a cloister completed in the 1360s by the master builder Mihoje Brajkov of Bar. The cloister is a square of paired columns with carved capitals in Romanesque-Gothic style, many of them decorated with human and fantastic faces, and a garden with palm trees and orange trees at its centre. The monastery pharmacy, Ljekarna Male Braće, was founded in 1317 and is regarded as one of the oldest continuously operating pharmacies in Europe, still dispensing medicines to residents. A museum within the complex displays pharmacy jars, mortars, scales, surgical instruments and handwritten recipe books dating from the Middle Ages. A library holds around 20,000 volumes, including incunabula and illuminated manuscripts, and a treasury contains reliquaries and liturgical silver. The adjoining church was devastated by the earthquake of 1667, which spared the cloister and the pharmacy, and the church facade was rebuilt in Baroque style, with a surviving Gothic-Renaissance portal and a Pietà above the door. The 1991 bombardment of Dubrovnik also damaged the roof, and the complex has since been restored. The museum is organised thematically around the pharmacy, library and sacred art, with signs in Croatian and English, and the cloister remains a quiet, shaded space just steps from the busy Stradun. The church remains in active use for Mass. Visitors enter from the Placa through the cloister gate, and the whole visit is compact enough to combine with a walk along the city walls from Pile Gate.