St. Thomas's Church (Rateče)

St. Thomas's Church in Rateče, Kranjska Gora, Slovenia, is one of the oldest churches in the upper Sava Valley, confirmed by written documents and excavations as well as the church's original furnishings. The oldest written document mentioning Rateče is the Vidimus by the first Ljubljana Bishop Sigmund Lamberg, which is preserved today in the kapitelj archive of the Ljubljana archdiocesan archives. It is a parchment document created at the time of Bishop Lamberg's visit to Kranjska Gora and is dated January 28, 1467. The Vidimus is a transcript of three manuscripts from the year 1390 (dated May 30, November 12, and December 8) addressing a change in the parish to which the church in Rateče belonged. The church, which until that time had been an affiliate church of the parish of Maria Gail near Villach (Beljak) in Carinthia, was taken from that parish and transferred to the parish of Kranjska Gora in Carniola under a grant by the regent Count Frederick III of Ortenburg. On 8 December 1390, Jan Soběslav, the Patriarch of Aquileia confirmed this change. An even older but undated document is the so-called Rateče or Klagenfurt Manuscript, one of the oldest written documents in Slovene.