Croatia keeps two centuries-old civic festivals — the knights’ tournament of the Sinjska alka, and Dubrovnik’s feast of St Blaise, celebrated by tradition for more than a thousand years.
Photo: PJL, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
Both festivals in this atlas are on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity: the Festivity of Saint Blaise, the patron of Dubrovnik, inscribed in 2009, and the Sinjska alka, a knights’ tournament in Sinj, inscribed in 2010.
Each remembers a city saved from an enemy — Dubrovnik warned of a Venetian attack by its saint in 972, according to legend, and Sinj defended against an Ottoman army in 1715.
Festa svetoga Vlaha
Dubrovnik has honoured its patron saint every February since, by tradition, the year 972 — releasing white doves on Candlemas, then carrying his relics along the Stradun in a procession of parish banners, folk costumes and old muskets fired in salute.
February 2 – 3, 2027Calculated
In the Croatian town of Sinj, horsemen in eighteenth-century dress gallop down a 160-metre track and try to spear a small iron ring hanging on a rope — a knights’ tournament held since the 1700s to remember a victory over an Ottoman army in 1715.
August 8, 2027Calculated