The Black Madonna of Marija Bistrica

The church of Marija Bistrica near Zagreb, Croatia, became a major pilgrimage site between the late 17th and 19th centuries. Pilgrims flocked to venerate the Black Madonna pictured here, a dark wooden statue that came to symbolize the congruence of Croatian identity and Catholicism. Statues or paintings of Black Madonnas or Black Virgins, depicting the Blessed Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus with dark skin, are common in both Catholic and Orthodox countries. While the paintings are often icons of Byzantine origin, the statues are usually made of wood, rarely of stone. There are various explanations for the origin of the Black Madonna trope, some of which suggest a possible pagan background.

Marija Bistrica, color photograph, 2006, unknown photographer; source: Wikimedia Commons, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Marija_Bistrica.jpg,  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en.