The first stećak I touched stood in a field outside Stolac, half-buried in meadow grass that reached my waist. I had driven three hours from Sarajevo along roads that wound through the Neretva canyon, following directions that amounted to “turn left at the mosque, then walk uphill until you see stones that shouldn’t be there.” The slab was rough-cut limestone the color of winter fog, and across its face someone six centuries past had carved a crescent moon overlapping a sun-disc — two shapes fitted together like closing eyelids.
A Church That Left No Catechism
The Krstjani — “Christians” in the plainest possible sense — left behind no liturgical manuscripts, no organizational chart historians can agree on. What they left were these stones: more than seventy thousand of them, scattered across the highlands of present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. Not all stećci belong to the Krstjani, but the density of tombstones in their heartlands suggests a community that treated stone as a medium of theology.