The Ozren Monastery is a Serbian Orthodox monastery dedicated to Saint Nicholas and located 6 kilometres from the town of Petrovo in northern Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is the spiritual centre of the area of Mount Ozren. It was probably founded in the second half of the 16th century, during the office of Serbian Patriarch Makarije Sokolović, who was granted permission from the sultan of the Ottoman Empire to renovate and build churches and monasteries. Folk tradition, formed in the 18th century, has it that the Ozren Monastery was founded by King Dragutin, a member of the Serbian Nemanjić dynasty, who ruled north-eastern Bosnia from 1284 to 1316.
The frescoes in the monastery's church were painted in the early 17th century. After the Great Turkish War (1683–1699), the monastery fell into disrepair. The renovation of the church began in 1842, after it was allowed by Ottoman authorities. The bell tower outside the church was built in 1872. The church was also refurbished in 1920 and 1996. Among its icons is a Pietà painted in the 17th century by Emmanuel Lambardos, a painter of the Cretan School.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.