Croatia: Fun with Stone

Here are some fun photos from Dubrovnik.

The idea is that if a guy can stand on this stone long enough to take off his shirt, he will have good luck.  (Gals can do the same, but shirt removal is not necessary.)

These fanciful carvings are from inside the courtyard of a Franciscan monastery.  (Also inside the same monastery—a pharmacy claiming to the be oldest continually operating pharmacy in Europe.  It’s been open for business since the 1300s.  The monks were the first proprietors, not unusual for the Middle Ages, when a monastery might be an inn, hospital, poor house, and research center all in one.)

These are from the Rector’s Palace, now a museum.  (The Rector was a secular government position, which involved, among other things, being forbidden to leave the palace during one’s term.)  There is a custom in architecture renovations that when you add something, you deliberately make it different than what was there so you do not deceive about what is old and original, and what is not.  I’m guessing that that is what is up with the hand rail.