Končul Monastery

Monastery Končul (Končulj) is located on the left bank of the Ibar River, 3 km southeast of Raška. According to traditional belief it was founded by Stefan Nemanja, around 1175. Končul Monastery is dedicated to St. Nicholas and is popularly known as the Nikoljača. It is known that St. Sava spent the first night of his escape to Chilandar on Mount Athos in this monastery. Also, there Archbishop Danilo II became a monk, and during King Milutin the monastery was the seat of the newly formed Ibar diocese. Its biggest rise the monastery experienced in the XIV and the first half of XV century.

 

With the arrival of the Turks in 1459, the monastery Končul, as well as other Serbian holy sites, had a hard times. The monastery was devastated and destroyed in the Austro-Turkish war in 1689, and remained in ruins until 1861 when the monastery church was rebuilt, which is the only one remaining of the entire monastery complex. From 1975 to 1979, in the church and the entire monastery complex archaeological research were carried out.

 

In 2000 the sisterhood of the monastery of Sveta Trojica, in Mušutište in Kosovo and Metohija, which was devastated in the invasion of Albanians, went to the monastery Končul and started with the material and the spiritual renewal of the sanctuary that was abandoned for centuries. In the monastery Končul, there are workshops for sewing and icon-painting workshop, in which the nuns make miniatures on parchment.