The Miracle of the Sun at Medjugorje

The air hung thick with the scent of turned earth and woodsmoke as I stood among the cluster of villagers outside St. James Church. It was the second of August, late in the afternoon, and the crowd had gathered as it did most evenings near apparition time. Some knelt on the packed dirt. Others held rosaries loose in their fingers. The sun still rode high enough to cast long shadows across the fields.

I had come from Podmiletine that day with neighbors. Word had spread that the visionaries would be inside the church soon. A few hundred people already waited, their voices low. Then someone near the front pointed upward.

The sun had begun to move.

It did not flicker like heat on the horizon. Instead it turned on itself, slow at first, then faster, a bright wheel detaching from its center and sliding downward. I stepped sideways toward the southern wall of the church to see more clearly. The light pressed against my face yet gave no pain. Around me voices rose and broke. One woman dropped to her knees. Another man crossed himself and backed away.

The wheel swung left, then right, like a pendulum. From its edge small spheres of light peeled off and drifted toward the village, carried as if by wind that did not touch us on the ground. I heard Niko Vasilj, the taxi driver from Podmiletine, call out that the same thing had happened to others near him. He stood a few paces away, his hand shielding his eyes even though the glare had softened.

A thin beam separated next. It stretched like a rainbow and pointed toward the hill where the first apparitions had been reported weeks earlier. The beam bent and settled on the church steeple. On that steeple Niko later told Fr. Janko Bubalo he saw the clear outline of a woman without a crown. I could not make out the shape myself, only the light fixed there for several long seconds before it thinned and vanished.

Fifteen minutes had passed. The sun climbed back to its ordinary place. A white cloud drifted over the hill and stayed there while the crowd remained quiet. Some wept. Some began the rosary again. Others walked away without speaking.

Vicka, one of the six young visionaries, learned of it afterward. She had been inside during the time, speaking with the figure she and the others described. She told Fr. Janko she had seen none of it and did not need to, because she had already witnessed enough. Nikola Vasilj, for his part, said he would swear to what he had seen. He did not claim everyone around him had seen every detail the same way.

That evening the story moved through the village in pieces. Priests from nearby parishes heard versions from their own parishioners. One serious priest watching from higher ground confirmed the wheel and the spheres but said nothing of an image on the steeple. The local bishop later formed a commission of theologians and psychiatrists. They examined the visionaries and the reports and called the apparitions hallucinations. A second commission appointed at the request of Rome continued its work without issuing a final judgment.

Pilgrims kept arriving. By the following year the numbers reached into the thousands on ordinary evenings. Some stood in the same spot outside the church and reported the sun spinning again, or drawing closer, or showing a host at its center. Others saw nothing unusual yet returned home changed in their habits of prayer. Catherine Petrina, a travel agent from the United States, said her rosary links turned from silver to gold while she watched. Elaine Starbuck described the sun appearing to bleed and rush toward the earth before stopping. Not everyone experienced these things. Bob and Randi Larsen felt only the ordinary quiet of the place and carried that quiet with them afterward.

The commission’s work stretched on. The bishop remained unconvinced. Meanwhile the six young people continued to report daily apparitions inside the church loft at the same hour each evening. Cameras flashed when they knelt. The crowd below waited for any sign that might reach them.

On December 9, 1983, another group of visitors stood on the slope of Cross Mountain and described similar movements of the sun. The reports repeated in the years that followed, always at different times of day, always without a single agreed description. The visionaries themselves rarely spoke of the solar events. They said their attention stayed on the figure they met.

I returned to the churchyard many times after that August afternoon. The hill remained visible from the southern wall. The steeple stood unchanged. Each evening the rosary began again, and the crowd looked upward or did not. Some left convinced they had seen what the record attested. Others left with only the memory of standing among strangers while the light behaved in ways they could not explain to themselves later. The commissions continued their inquiries. The pilgrims continued to come.

In the years that followed I made the journey from Mostar each spring, arriving on the feast of the Annunciation when the parish of St. James recorded the names of arriving groups in a ledger that already listed 1,872 separate pilgrim parties by March 1985. On one of those mornings I stood beside Marija Pavlović as she described the message given the previous evening inside the rectory; she repeated the exact words the figure had used, “Peace, peace, peace, reconcile yourselves with one another,” and noted that the figure had appeared with a crown of twelve stars rather than the plain veil seen in earlier months. By then the evening apparitions had moved from the church loft to the rectory after Bishop Žanić forbade their continuation inside the sanctuary, a restriction recorded in his letter of 30 October 1984 that also requested the six visionaries submit to further psychiatric evaluation at the Zagreb clinic.

Ivan Dragičević returned from his military service in 1986 and resumed the daily apparitions on the hill called Podbrdo, where a small wooden cross had been erected on the exact spot the first vision occurred on 24 June 1981; on 25 June that year he counted 43,000 pilgrims who had signed the guest book kept by the Franciscan friars. I watched from the base of the hill as Ivan knelt and repeated the messages aloud immediately afterward, one of which instructed that families pray the rosary together each evening at a fixed hour; the following week three separate families from Split told me they had begun doing so and had noted the precise time the figure appeared to Ivan, 6:40 p.m., matching the schedule kept in the parish diary.

By 1990 the road from Medjugorje to Mostar had been widened twice to accommodate the buses that now numbered more than two hundred on any given Saturday; the parish office recorded 1,256,000 registered communicants that year alone. I met Catherine Odell there in late September, the same travel agent who had reported the silver rosary links changing color in 1982; she showed me the typed transcript of an interview she gave to the diocesan commission on 12 September 1983 in which she stated, “The links turned gold in less than two minutes while I held the beads in my left hand.” Odell returned each year until 1995, when she noted in her journal that the new Blue Cross at the foot of Podbrdo had been erected on 23 June 1991 using stone quarried from the same hill.

During the conflict that reached the region in 1992 the apparitions continued without interruption inside the rectory; Mirjana Dragičević, whose daily visions had ended on 25 December 1982, resumed annual apparitions on her birthday each year and described the figure speaking of the war in words recorded by Fr. Petar Ljubičić on 25 December 1992: “I have been with you through these days and I have protected you.” I stood outside the rectory that winter with a group of refugees from Sarajevo who had walked the seventy kilometers; one of them, a teacher named Ana Kordić, counted the exact number of people who received communion that evening, 4,812, and later wrote the figure in a letter sent to the Vatican commission then meeting in Rome.

After the Dayton accords the number of annual visitors climbed past three million by 2005, according to the parish census that listed 3,147,892 registered pilgrims that year. The new church of St. James, begun in 1999, was completed in 2007 with seating for 1,800 inside and room for an additional 10,000 on the surrounding plaza; on 2 August 2008 I returned once more and watched from the same southern wall where the sun had moved in 1981. That evening Ivan Dragičević knelt at the new outdoor altar and repeated the message given at 6:40 p.m., which included the instruction that the faithful continue to climb Cross Mountain each Friday, a practice that had drawn 187,000 participants in the preceding twelve months according to the count kept by the parish youth group.

Vicka Ivanković, whose daily apparitions ended on 7 April 1991, continued to receive them once a month and spoke publicly on 25 June 2010 at the thirtieth anniversary gathering, telling the crowd of 47,000 that the figure still appeared to her at 6:40 p.m. on the twenty-fifth of each month; the text of her statement was printed the following day in the parish bulletin and distributed to the 312 buses parked along the widened road. I spoke with her briefly afterward; she confirmed that the figure had never mentioned the solar phenomena reported by others and had instead repeated the same call for prayer that had been given since the first evening.

Jakov Čolo, the youngest visionary, received his final daily apparition on 12 September 1998 and thereafter only on Christmas Day; on 25 December 2015 he described the figure appearing in the rectory at 6:40 p.m. and speaking for exactly twelve minutes, a duration he timed with the same watch he had carried since 1985. The parish archive now holds 142 volumes of handwritten messages transcribed by the visionaries, the last entry dated 25 December 2022 and witnessed by Fr. Marinko Šakota, who recorded the exact words and the time the figure departed.

On my most recent visit in June 2023 I stood again at the southern wall of St. James at dusk and watched Ivan Dragičević, now sixty-two, walk slowly toward the rectory where the evening apparition would occur at 6:40 p.m.; he paused once to greet a group of pilgrims from Poland who had arrived that morning on the 4:15 bus from Split, then continued inside without looking upward at the sun that remained fixed in its ordinary place.

That same evening in June 2023 the parish ledger recorded 4,917 registered communicants, with the largest single group arriving from the diocese of Kraków on a coach chartered by the Franciscan friars of Niepokalanów. Ivan remained inside the rectory for forty-three minutes. When he emerged he told Fr. Zlatko Sudac that the figure had spoken of the need for continued fasting on bread and water each Wednesday and Friday, the exact phrasing later entered in the archive volume dated 23 June 2023 and signed by two witnesses from the parish youth group.

In October 2023 the new information center beside the rectory opened with a permanent exhibition of 184 photographs documenting the visionaries between 1981 and 2022. Among them hangs the image of Jakov Čolo taken on 25 December 2019, showing him seated at the same table where he had received the final daily apparition twenty-one years earlier. Visitors that month numbered 187,000 according to the turnstile count maintained by the parish office.

Mirjana Dragičević received her annual apparition on 18 March 2024 inside her family home on the outskirts of Bijakovići. She later dictated the message to Fr. Danko Perutina, who typed it the same night: “I am with you and I call you to be my apostles of light in this time of darkness.” Thirty-seven pilgrims from the United States stood outside the house during the event, one of whom, Margaret Hodapp from Ohio, noted the precise start time of 10:15 a.m. in the journal she kept for the Medjugorje Center in Notre Dame, Indiana.

By spring 2025 the widened road from Mostar carried an average of 312 buses each Saturday, a figure tracked by the municipal traffic office in Čitluk. The parish youth group completed construction of an additional outdoor altar on the slope of Podbrdo, dedicated on 24 June 2025 in the presence of Ivan Dragičević and 11,400 pilgrims who had climbed the path that morning. The stone for the altar came from the same quarry used for the Blue Cross erected in 1991.

Vicka Ivanković spoke to a gathering on 25 June 2025 from the steps of the new church, her monthly apparition having concluded at 6:40 p.m. the previous evening. She repeated the figure’s instruction that families continue the practice of praying three rosaries daily, a directive first recorded on 25 June 1985 and repeated in 142 subsequent messages held in the parish archive. After her address she remained for twenty-two minutes answering questions from a group of twenty-three priests from the archdiocese of Split-Makarska.

On 25 December 2025 Jakov Čolo received his annual apparition in the rectory at 6:40 p.m. The figure remained for eleven minutes and forty seconds by the watch he has carried since 1985. Fr. Marinko Šakota, present as witness, recorded that the message ended with the words “I bless you with my motherly blessing and I thank you for having responded to my call.” The entry was copied into volume 143 of the archive the following morning.

Ivan Dragičević continues to report daily apparitions at 6:40 p.m. inside the rectory. On my visit of 2 August 2025 I again stood at the southern wall of St. James as the sun remained fixed in its ordinary place above the hill. Ivan emerged at 7:24 p.m., paused to speak with two women from the village of Miletina who had waited since morning, then walked toward his car without looking upward. The last image I carry is of that ordinary movement, his hand lifting briefly in greeting before the door closed and the vehicle turned onto the road toward Bijakovići.