Tavna Monastery, Serbian Orthodox monastery in Banjica, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Tavna Monastery is a Serbian Orthodox monastery in the village of Banjica, 25 km southwest of Bijeljina at the foot of Mount Majevica. Its Church of the Holy Trinity has a rounded apse of rough light-brown stone blocks with tall narrow arched windows, and two square towers capped by grey-green metal domes, the right one taller and onion-shaped. A high stone wall of recent construction encloses most of the complex.
According to the chronicles of Tronoša and Peć monasteries, the monastery was founded in medieval times by King Stefan Dragutin's sons Vladislav and Urošica. It faced destruction over the centuries but was later rebuilt during the period of Ottoman rule.
The monastery church was painted with frescoes probably in the early 17th century; the modest surviving fragments closely resemble the frescoes of Žitomislić and Ozren monasteries, made in 1608–1609. A Jesuit priest, Rudolf Bzenski, staying in Zvornik in 1688–1689, noted that the Orthodox here had very fine churches decorated with frescoes.
The monastery lies in the village of Tavna at the foot of Mount Majevica, about 25 km southwest of Bijeljina, near the point where the Bijeljina, Zvornik and Ugljevik municipalities meet. Access is from a local road on the southeast side, and almost the whole site is enclosed by a high stone wall of recent construction. It is an active women's monastery, so dress and behaviour should suit a working religious community.
The monastery's founding is dated by two Ottoman tax registers: it appears in the 1533 census of the Zvornik sanjak and is explicitly called a monastery in the 1548 register. Archaeologist Mirko Babić's July 1994 excavations found two transverse foundations in the church, which he read as three building phases: a 14th-century apse, a 16th-century narthex and the 1884 bell tower.
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