Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas

The Tourist Route then takes you north, past the Orthodox Church of St. Nicholas, designed by the Rijeka architect I. Hencke (after whom the street has been named). There is nothing on the church exterior that reveals its confessional particularity; the construction is purely late Austrian Baroque. The location of the church was precisely defined by the town plan, but the legend wants it otherwise. According to it, the Governor of Rijeka responded in anger to persistent demands of the local Orthodox community by issuing it a special 'location permit'. Standing on what was then the sea shore in front of the Clock Tower, he is said to have thrown a stone as far as he could into the sea saying, 'build your church there', upon which the Orthodox of Rijeka got down to filling up the area. Be that as it may, the truth and the legend remind us how far the filling up of the sea in front of the town had come by the end of the 1700s. Along the north wall of the church, in Adamićeva Street, lie the so-called Orthodox shops, built in the early 1900s in the pure Secession style by B. Slocovich.