In 2006, the Ministry financed preservation works on 32 Orthodox sacral monuments, the Ministry said in a statement in response to Patriarch Pavle's call on Culture Minister Bozo Biskupic to protect the Serb cultural heritage in Croatia.
In a letter that was sent today to Biskupic and was published on the Serb Orthodox Church's web site, Patriarch Pavle said that the local office for the protection of cultural monuments in Sibenik had ignored the existence of the Orthodox Church of SS Joachim and Anna in Bribir and that an information board put up in the old part of the town mentioned Roman Catholic churches, but not the Orthodox heritage.
The ministry responded that such boards had been put up by the tourism board in Skradin and that so far only archaeological sites had been marked, as well as that the ministry's conservation department had not been consulted about the text on the board.
The ministry went on to say that it would warn the local tourism board about this omission and dismissed claims that it was not caring sufficiently about the Orthodox sacral heritage.
The Serb Orthodox diocese in Dalmatia said on its web site in early December that spiritual and cultural genocide had been committed in Bribir because information boards on that archaeological site did not mention Orthodox buildings.
The tourism board in Skradin said at the time that the information boards referred only to archeological monuments that were being conserved, mostly those dating back to the ancient times and the Middle Ages.
The information boards were put up within a project on the development of cultural tourism in the Skradin area called "Turina and Bribir", which is co-financed by the European Union.
Ivo Pedisic, head of the archeological department of the Sibenik City Museum, who cooperated on the project, said that there had been no intention to ignore or claim the Church of SS Joachim and Anna, because it dated back to the 18th century and was not the subject of archaeological research.