Ninety seconds on St. George's Island Benedictine Monastery
Notable families of Perast and of the whole bay were buried out here under the cypresses, and the Benedictines still hold the place, so it is closed to the public. What there is to see is seen from the water.
Boats out of Perast pass it on the way to Our Lady of the Rocks. Sveti Đorđe is the natural island of the pair, carrying a Benedictine monastery of the twelfth century and the old burial ground of the Perast nobility.
Cypresses first, then the wall, then the low church behind it. The island is the natural one of the pair off Perast and it has never been built out the way its neighbour was; the graveyard under the trees is the reason it looks as it does, and it holds notable citizens of Perast and the old nobility of the whole bay. Locally it is the Island of the Dead. Beside it, Our Lady of the Rocks is a man made islet carrying a church anybody can walk into. This one is older, greener and shut.
The Benedictines founded the house in the twelfth century. The island was fortified and fought over as late as the Napoleonic wars, when a British and Sicilian naval force took it from the French garrison on 14 October 1813, during the siege of Cattaro.
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