These are the stories you can open in the 3D view, each at its own numbered point on the model.
1A Gothic front on the promenade
This is the Co-cathedral of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Bitola's Catholic church. Its narrow front stands in the row of houses on Širok Sokak, so only the façade and the tower show. The neo-Gothic style, with pointed arches, gables and a needle spire, is rare in this region. The permit for the church was issued in December 1909, and sources differ on the year it was completed.
The story of this church begins with French Lazarist missionaries, who arrived in Bitola in 1856 and 1857. They bought a hotel on Širok Sokak known as the Locanda and made it the base of their mission. The Catholic community has kept its place on the town's main street ever since.
The present building is not the first Catholic church on this site. An earlier church was built here around 1870. In 1900 it was destroyed by fire, and the community had to start again. The neo-Gothic church you see today rose in its place in the following decade.
Between 1877 and 1881 the mission hung a bell for its church. It did not ring for long. After protests in the town, the bell was silenced and taken down again. Only decades later, in 1938 to 1940, did the church receive the tall bell tower you see today.
The plans for the new church were drawn in Paris, though the architect's name is not recorded. The walls are of brick, rendered white, and the front is a careful composition: three gables edged in dark red, pairs of lancet windows, a blind arcade and a round rose window above the portal. It is a piece of Western European church building set into a Balkan street.
The pointed portal frames a pair of blue-painted doors behind an iron grille, a detail many visitors remember from the street. Inside, the main altar is a Gothic work carved from chestnut wood and made in Munich, in keeping with the style of the building around it.
For its first decades the church had no tower. The square belfry and its steep needle spire were built between 1938 and 1940, a gift of Slovenian parishioners. Small pinnacles and gablets gather around the foot of the spire, which ends in a cross some thirty metres above the street.
Širok Sokak is Bitola's promenade, lined with cafés and pastel townhouses. Walking along it, the slender spire of the Sacred Heart is one of the vertical markers that tells you where you are. From the cafés opposite, it rises above the roofs between the plain house fronts on either side.
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