The Church of Shirq or Shirq Monastery is a church and Benedictine monastery, now containing only it’s ruins (old wall and a cult object), in the village of Shirq, currently part of the municipality of Dajç in the Bunë River area in northern Albania. The church was built by Queen Helena of Anjou in 1290 and dedicated to the saints Sergius and Bacchus. The building was constructed upon a 6th-century basilica.
Early History
According to a legendary account, which is also agreed upon by many authors, the monastery church was founded in the 6th century during the rule of Emperor Justinian.
In a photograph from the year 1900 taken by Theodor Ippen and published in 1907, the church’s history is depicted. Numerous historical sources discuss the history of this church, starting with the Chronicle of Pop Duklja and continuing with various documents compiled in the work “Acta et Diplomata…”, where this church and its saints are mentioned 56 times between the years 1100 and 1406. The Chronicle of Pop Duklja claims that several members of the Vojislavljević dynasty of Duklja were buried here, such as Mihailo I, Konstantin Bodin, Dobroslav, Vladimiri, and Gradinja. Six sources from “Acta et Diplomata…” that date before 1290 clearly state that a Benedictine monastery was located there.
Between the two Latin inscriptions of the church, the earlier one from 1290 indicates that Queen Helena, along with her sons Uroš and Stefan, reconstructed the church rather than building it from scratch. The later inscription suggests a second phase of construction, specifically around 1318.
Modern History
Among all the mentions or descriptions of the church, there are mostly notes about its state of ruins during the Middle Ages. The first information that mentions the abandonment of the church dates back to 1452 in a note from Pope Nicholas V, highlighting that the Benedictines had almost forsaken it (“a monachis fere desertum”) due to the bishop of that time in Shkodra.
Marino Bizzi, the Archbishop of Tivar at the time, wrote in 1611 in a report to the Vatican about significant damage caused to the church as a result of Ottoman presence in Albania. Bogdani’s report on March 24, 1684, states that there is a “very beautiful bell tower that, from its height, overlooks the entire land of Shkodra. Tradition says that the bells of this royal church are buried between this church and the Church of Saint Friday [which is] 300 steps away.” Daniele Farlati mentions the church in his work “Illyricum sacrum.” In 1790, Archbishop Frang Borci informed Coletti, Farlati’s assistant, who was about to reprint “Illyricum sacrum,” that the church was the most beautiful in Albania.
In 1905, the French consul Degrand in Shkodra is the only author to allude to the presence of remains of medieval frescoes and walls of the church, or the presence of mosaics, which are unverifiable later on. At that time, only three out of four surrounding walls were still standing. Ippen, the Austro-Hungarian consul of Shkodra, observed that at the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, tomb robbers around Shirq found old mosaics around the church. Now, only one wall remains standing, and the mosaics can no longer be seen.
The monastery was under the jurisdiction of the Vatican throughout its active existence. It was listed as a Cultural Monument by the Albanian government in 1970.
