Saint Blaise’s Church, Dubrovnik

The Church of Saint Blaise holds a gilded statue of the city’s patron saint above its altar, his hands cradling a model of Dubrovnik as it appeared before the great earthquake of sixteen sixty-seven. When a fire gutted the old medieval church in seventeen oh six, the fire melted the silver plating on the statue, yet the figure remained standing among the ashes. The local stonemason Marino Gropelli rebuilt the current structure in the Venetian Baroque style to house that surviving relic.