Ninety seconds on Saint Nicholas Church Perast
The church is free and the tower beside it is not, and the tower is shut from the middle of October to the middle of May. In season it opens about ten, later than the church, and children under fifteen are refused.
A Baroque parish church built in the 17th century and overlooking Perast's waterfront; notable for its bell tower and views across the Bay of Kotor.
Fifty five metres of bell tower, the tallest church tower on the eastern Adriatic coast, and the climb is what the square is walked up for. At the top the whole bay opens, with the two islets directly below and the town reduced to one line of roofs. The clock on it arrived from Venice in 1730. Inside the church are the dramatic paintings of Tripo Kokolja, the Perast painter. Behind it stands the shell of what this church was meant to become, an expansion into a grand cathedral begun in the 1740s.
The church started as a modest structure and stayed one. In the 1740s the Italian architect Giuseppe Beati was charged with expanding it into a grand cathedral; he died before completing the project, and what he had built stands unfinished behind the church it was meant to replace.
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