The Baska tablet

An 11th-century stone that is effectively Croatia’s birth certificate

It is a slab of limestone, roughly two metres by one, nine centimetres thick, about eight hundred kilograms, carved with thirteen lines of Glagolitic. It was found in the church of St Lucy at Jurandvor, near Baška on the island of Krk, and it dates to about 1100. Croatians call it the most valuable monument of their literacy, and the claim holds up.

Glagolitic is the oldest known Slavic alphabet, older than Cyrillic, and it survived longest on exactly this coast. The tablet is written in the Croatian recension of Church Slavonic, and what it records is a piece of ordinary administration: King Zvonimir granting land to the Benedictine abbey of St Lucy. Legal paperwork, cut into stone.

The reason it matters is one word inside the king's title. This is the first appearance of the Croatian national name written in Croatian. From the king's grant it records, the stone is also called Zvonimir's Tablet and the Royal Tablet. A nation's name has to be written down for a first time somewhere, and this is that somewhere.

The tablet was discovered in the nineteenth century, and since 1934 the original has been in Zagreb, in the atrium of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, where it was desalinated and has been conserved ever since. What stands in the church at Jurandvor now is a faithful copy.

So this pin is two visits, not one. Krk gives you the place: a small Romanesque church in a green valley behind Baška, the setting the stone sat in for eight centuries, with a copy in situ and a marked Glagolitic trail nearby. Zagreb gives you the object itself. If you can only do one, do Krk, because the landscape is the half that a photograph cannot hand you.