Church of St Martin, Martin

On a low hill at the edge of the village of Martin, just west of Našice, above the turn from the main road towards Seona, stands a church that is centuries older than the village around it. The small single-nave church of St Martin is a late Romanesque building whose first owners were the Knights Templar, and it has outlived the order that built it, the order that inherited it and the Ottoman wars that emptied the land around it.

The Templars held estates in this part of Slavonia from the late 12th century, and they raised the church on their own land. In the 14th century, after the suppression of the Templars, the church passed to the Knights Hospitaller, who kept it until the Ottoman advance of 1531. Since then the Franciscans of the Našice friary of St Anthony of Padua have looked after it, and it belongs today to the Našice parish of St Anthony.

In the 18th century the church was renovated in the Baroque manner, and the medieval building now has to be read from its plan and its stone walls rather than its front.

The village is much younger than its church. Martin did not exist in Templar or Hospitaller times; it was founded in the middle of the 18th century by settlers from Gorski kotar, and families from Slovakia followed at the end of that century. In 1991, during the Homeland War, the Yugoslav army hit the church with three tank shells, and the early Baroque altar suffered the worst damage, even though the building was protected as a monument of the highest category.

Today St Martin's serves as the village cemetery church. The feast of St Martin, 11 November, is its main day, when the village holds its kirvaj. The visit is mostly about the building in its setting: the hilltop, the graves around it and the Krndija slopes to the south. It pairs well with the Franciscan church and the Pejačević palaces in Našice.