Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.47960/2712-1844.2026.12.33
Four Property Lists/Inventories (Našastari) of Parish Houses in Herzegovina at the End of the Eighteenth Century
Milo Jukić
; Independent researcher, Kreševo
Abstract
Parish houses have generally been mentioned only in passing, to wit as part of discussions of other, more important, topics in scholarly works dealing with the activities of the Catholic Church in Herzegovina in the previous centuries.
After Catholic churches and monasteries had all been destroyed in the first centuries of Ottoman rule in Herzegovina, Herzegovinian Catholics were ministered to by priests from Dalmatian monasteries. Permanent priests, living in the parishes assigned to them, began to appear only at the beginning of the eighteenth century, after Herzegovina had been placed under the pastoral oversight of the Franciscan monastery of Kreševo.
It is widely known that throughout its lifetime the Ottoman polity prohibited construction of Catholic churches; at the same time, taxes had to be paid on every designated parish house, since its presence was understood as the existence of a parish. For this reason, until the second half of the eighteenth century, priests – mainly Franciscans, occasionally Glagolitic clerics – resided at their parishioners', serving the faithful in the surrounding area, with Mass celebrated in secluded outdoor locations.
Only in the second half of the eighteenth century were parish houses erected in some parishes. For some, the date of construction or their earliest mention is known, but all records published to date largely amount to descriptive judgements, namely that they were "miserable", "unimposing", or "more like village cottages than appropriate parish residences", yet specific evidence to substantiate and confirm such assessments is lacking. The construction of parish houses was prevented or slowed by frequent Venetian-Ottoman conflicts, especially the Cretan War (1645–1669), as well as by the burning of the mother monastery at Kreševo together with its church in 1765, as its reconstruction took priority, since without it the very survival of monastic parishes and pastoral care for the local faithful would have been called into question. Furthermore, parish houses, like the priests who dwelled in them, were not infrequently the target of attacks by local "Turks".
The aim of this paper is to present four previously unknown našastari (property lists, inventories) of Herzegovinian parishes from the late eighteenth century, which contain a wealth of information about what parish priests of the time possessed – from everyday household items through liturgical vestments and vessels to foodstuff and livestock and, in one case, a modest home library.
Keywords
našastari (property lists, inventories); parish houses; Herzegovina; eighteenth century.
Hrčak ID:
351182
URI
Publication date:
1.10.2026.
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