The sacral works of architect Ante Rožić are almost completely unknown among the wider public. The reasons for this can be found in the times and circumstances in which these buildings were created. All of Rožić’s architectural works, including churches built in the 1960s and 1970s, are connected to the Makarska Riviera. With the distance of half a century, we can offer our assessment of the architectural and political activities of that period.

 

Ante Rožić is the author of the Assumption of Blessed Mary Virgin Church, built in 1964 in Podgora, St. George the Martyr and Immaculate Conception in Drašnice, a church that was built from 1971 for the next thirty years, and the St. Nikola Tavelić Church in Tučepi. We need to ask ourselves why none of these projects were published about until the interview with the architect Rožić, Between Tradition and Modernity, came out in Oris 81 in 2013? 

 

To put it mildly, the period when these important projects were made was not fond of sacral architecture. We need only remember the doyen of Croatian architecture, Stjepan Planić, and his sin – the project for the minaret of the redesigned Zagreb mosque, today known as the Meštrović Pavilion, or the Home of Croatian Artists, and the architectural stigma that followed him for many subsequent years. Or let us briefly consider Jože Plečnik, who was labelled an ecclesiastical architect by the post-war commissaries and banished into oblivion until the 1980s when Boris Podrecca revealed him to the global public through a large exhibition. Architects are apolitical by their habitus, but everything around them is political.