Dušan Koman

The parish church of St. Cantianus stands in the middle of the old part of the town of Kranj with its splendid strategic location on a marked promontory above the rivers Sava and Kokra. This Gothic church, whose layout spawned several copies in Slovenia, is the third ecclesiastical building on this location. The earliest building was built in the 6th century and the second, in the pre-Romanesque style, in the 10th century. It stands in the area of a cemetery from the Early Middle Ages, in the main square beside the theatre, and dominates the entire town due to its height. It is also the central landmark in the town silhouette.


The present-day church was built following a one integral scheme. The two-field presbytery with the ending in the form of five side of an octagon was built in 1413. Twenty years later there are written records of bells and of the belfry, which suggests that all the exterior building walls were also finished by this time, whilst a decision was made to vault the hall nave in 1452. The cross-vaulted presbytery, subordinate in its appearance to the nave, is an example of the so-called long choir. Although the nave is rectangular in its layout, its west part incorporates the belfry and the west empora, thus practically turning the section for worshippers into a square, which is divided by four pillars into nine square fields  of equal size. The nave vault is the first example of a vault scheme on the basis of an eight-pointed star in Slovenia. Equally sized naves make an ideal hall in which the space flows equally in all directions. The church was given its present appearance at the end of the 19th century, when the neo-Gothic belfry apex, the chapel and the vestry by the choir and the two side portals in the west front were added. It is due to two of these elements, the chapel on the north and the storied vestry on the south side, that the church seems to have a transept, when viewed from the outside.