The tourist town of Split is all about the Old and revolves around The (jaw dropping) Diocletian Palace that is a City built within a City within a Palace.
Confused? It is a bit like that! On arriving in Split we didn’t even know it existed until it was explained to us at the tourist office. Excited, we then headed straight for the ‘Palace’ and wandered around, it is amazing, a vast labyrinth of multi story buildings looking down on you seemingly built into walls upon walls. It is a jumble of amazing looking streets and very confusing. Then you burst into a large colonnaded Roman style courtyard with a sphinx, Roman gladiators and a gigantic bell tower hovering overhead and it literally takes your breath away.
It is amazing being there and wandering through the streets but there is not a lot of context. The Information Center was one of the most informative we have been too anywhere in the world but there info was still patchy on the Palace, the towns biggest draw card! So we booked ourselves on a walking tour. After 2 hours this place made so much sense and the secrets of the alleys and palace were unlocked in a pretty amazing way by Natasha our guide who has a degree in Classics and Art History…Rosie’s dream studies….doing my dream job. Sigh.
Rosie will try to keep the historical back story in a nutshell…it is interesting, but very long winded. The simple version is Diocletian was one of four Roman Emperors ruling his quarter of the Empire, his patch was roughly this side of the Adriatic, Turkey and Egypt. He started out as a common, simple soldier that worked his way through the ranks and was then elevated by the huge army he commanded to become Emperor after theirs was assassinated, and, then the assassinator was assassinated because no one wanted him ruling.…Diocletian was voted into the vacancy and ruled fairly and justly for many years between 286 – 305AD.
When the Emperors got to a certain age, they retired (which was a rare thing due to the porchant for assassinations). So Diocletian built a beautiful retirement palace for himself in Split at the end of the 3rd century AD. 1,718 years later, this palace is what Rosie and The Operator are visiting today. It is mind blowing, incredible and amazing!
A lot has changed with the palace over 1,700 odd years but the walking tour helped to put it all into context.
This model of the original palace layout shows how the army barracks and temples are on the left of the photo and the large square apartments of Diocletian were on the right had side. Large avenues ran through the center linking all the important areas of the palace in a beautifully symmetrical way.
After Diocletians death in 311AD the palace was abandoned until the ruling Venetians took it over in the 7th century. They started to remodel and build housing, shops and official buildings for citizens in those large wide Roman avenues. The first example of urban infill Rosie muses?
Over time and many other take overs and differing countries ruling the city throughout the centuries, the footprint of the internal palace has changed tremendously. Buildings were being built upon and next to other buildings, trying to fit as much as possible into the restricted space, whilst the outer walls have remained exactly the same.
Before you go into the Palace, standing in front of the entry gate, is the huge statue of the Bishop who wanted to revolutionize the church back in the 1100s and have all religious texts in his country rewritten in Croatian instead of Latin….because, sensibly hardly anyone could read Latin, it was only the language of the church.
This Bishop wanted religious teaching to be accessible and understandable to everyone….well, his head was chopped off for such a sensible…ooooops, crazy idea. See his shiny toe, rub it and you will come back one day to Split.
Cool story about the statue, because there were no paintings ever made of The Bishop, no one knew/knows what he looked like….so his face is actually that of the sculptor who made the statue….around the town are other statues of famous ancient dudes and they too have the same face, you can tell because of the strange bent, broken looking nose….and because we do know what the sculptor looked like.
Let Rosie show you around this Palace proper like. Starting at the Golden Gate, one of 4 entrances into the Palace, the grandest and the one most furthest from the sea. The anticipation you get looking at these huge walls and the gate is palpable, you know you are about to enter somewhere exciting and unlike anywhere you have seen before.
First up though you can see windows cut into the wall above, these are not original but from a much later date when houses for residents were built into the walls during the 15th century. The empty niches above the archway used to have statues of Diocletian and his fellow Emperors in them but they were all taken down and destroyed by the Christians.
Upon entering, the Golden Gate has a Roman double defense system, or a secondary gate to stop intruders that may breach the outer door. When they entered the inner courtyard and were facing the second door they were then vulnerable to rocks and boiling oil being dumped on them.
In the courtyard, above the outer gate is three windows, (above pic) this is the minuscule soldiers chapel, lodged in the tiny area above the gate. Rosie and The Operator visited it and, it was kept by the tiniest, smiliest nun I have ever seen. It was such a beautiful little space.
Through this gate is where the mish mash of buildings starts. What used to be a long straight corridor wide enough for two Roman chariots to drive side by side has turned into a footpath barely three persons wide in some areas, a lot of it was dark, shaded, cold and gloomy.
Tall buildings rear overhead and if you stop and look you can see the different layers of additions over time through the differing styles of build.
Down every alley way tables and chairs sit in single rows along the walls, small courtyards house coffee shops, bars and cafes. Rosie has never seen such a concentration of refreshment stops in one place. There are tables for thousands lining every spare nook, cranny and space of this maze.
You pop out into The Peoples Square for a well deserved breather, its nice to have some open space and not be shoulder to shoulder with everyone in the alleyways. No where is it more apparent in this square looking around to see the effect time and age has on the reconstruction of the Palace. Every building is from a different era.
Venetian buildings are built onto the Roman, Austrian architecture stands proud from their time ruling the city and twentieth century boxes join the mix. Rosie is no expert on architecture but you can see the different styles from different ages just looking around.
Rosie thought the paths and streets were so shiny because they were marble….they are not, they are the limestone pavers laid by the Romans and are just shiny from time and wear, polished smooth over thousands of years and footsteps.
It was pointed out to us by Natasha that the inside of this modern bank, (below) still retains the original Roman footpath and drain….see it cordoned off, amazing eh? The little step and partial column was part of the original road way….crazy.
Below is the Silver Gate entrance to the palace, it has the most original amount of Roman Road not built over in the whole palace. You can see how wide and open the avenues were. The road used to be colonnaded on both sides, there are only a few columns left but you do get the idea, see the edge of the original footpath? The openness of this space certainly makes you gape at how filled in the other areas are.
Walking along the Roman road from the Silver Gate you see this octagonal building, it was the mausoleum of Diocletian. He died in 311AD and his body was laid to rest in the mausoleum he had built for himself.
In the 1100s the Christians could not abide having all these tributes to Roman paganism about so they removed the body of Diocletian, dumped him in the sea and turned the mausoleum into a church….which it is still today and is truly beautiful inside. Dont tell the Christians, but inside on the ceilings are the original Roman paintings of Diocletian and his wife looking over everything still from thousands of years ago.
Down a flight of steps the dank, dim, airless crypt of the mausoleum houses a chapel to St Lucy – The Patron Saint of The Blind. Ironically, Lucy was killed by the Emperor Diocletian in 304 AD for her beliefs in Christianity. Her statue stands in the gloom surrounded by daily prayers of thanks and entreaties of cure from the faithful.
Her Feast Day is December the 13th and on this day the well in the crypt is blessed. Streams of people then visit to pray and wash their eyes with the holy water to cure or stave off blindness or vision ailments.
The bell tower was added in the 1100s when the mausoleum was converted to a church. Rosie and The Operator climbed it to get an overview of the town and surrounds.
What a beautiful view there was to be had of the surrounding town, port and countryside! The green hill below is Marjan Park where The Operator climbed to the very top. You can see the huge cruise ships in the next photo, parked up after dropping thousands of tourists off to flood this town.
In the shadow of the bell tower is the most amazing part of the palace, the Peristyle. Rosie has saved the best till lastish. You walk into this area for the first time and stop still in awe with your jaw hanging open, well Rosie did anyway.
She has never been anywhere or seen anything like it. It felt like I had been transported back in time into the middle of the Palace of Diocletian 1700 years ago and I was waiting for The Emperor himself to appear on the balcony at the end and issue a great proclamation.
Rosie had to sit down to soak up the atmosphere and take it all in. So we sat on the steps of the peristyle that had been turned into a coffee shop. The cushions signified the seats of the cafe and the wooden trays were your tables….the waiters were very good at shooing people away if you had just stopped for a rest and weren’t going to buy anything. We sipped the most expensive coffee we had ever bought in the whole of Croatia and just took it all in.
The Peristyle was the center of the palace and the beating heart of it, it pretty much looked, back then, like it does today, an open courtyard colonnaded around the edges. The back wall is where the Emperor Diocletian stood on his balcony above the crowds and spoke to the people. Only at certain times of the day mind you…behind the balcony is an open topped vestibule made of golden brick….at certain times of the day, the sun would shine into the vestibule and bathe The Emperor in a golden light from behind giving him a godly countenance to reinforce his proclamations. You can see in the pic below how that light would have looked when it reached him through the door as he stood on the balcony in front of it looking out onto the Peristyle.
The beautiful round vestibule has perfect acoustics and Traditional Croatian Capella singers sing their beautiful songs in this chamber. Rosie and The Operator was in here listening and the applause had just died down for the group of men singers when a small Japanese lady pushed in front of them and started singing herself…she had the most beautiful soprano voice ever….and wouldn’t stop….she was loving her 15 mins of Croatian fame for the crowds.
The Bell tower looms over us in the Peristyle with the mausoleum behind it, and see the beautiful colonnades of reddy coloured marble? They were transported all the way from Egypt for this build and are over 3500 years old!
In the corner is a sphinx, this ancient Egyptian antiquity came from Egypt at the same time to decorate the palace. Diocletian did have 12, but this is the only one remaining intact as the Christians beheaded and destroyed the others for being ‘evil’.
Artists paint on the fringes of the Peristyle and gladiators pose with tourists for photographs…after their coffee and fag breaks of course. The Peristyle is a place you just return too time and time again to let the ancientness wash over you and to take a breather from the crammed alleyways full of people.
The basement of the Palace is also utterly remarkable. It was built to support Diocletian’s private apartments above it and until 1956 was totally unexplored and filled up to the ceiling with the rubbish and detrius of thousands of years. Rosie would so have volunteered to do that cleaning job, I would really like to know what they found here….This basement mirrors the floor plan of the original imperial living quarters and wandering around here amongst the souvenir sellers you get an idea of what upstairs would have been like.
Walking around the alleys you pop out into tiny squares…which used to be big ones but have been infilled. In one square is the tiny Roman Temple of Jupiter, the square was so small I couldnt even get a full photo of the tiny temple! Built by Diocletian and dedicated to the Roman god Jupiter, well the Christians didnt like that either, they reclaimed it, did a few renos and renamed it the Church of St John The Baptist.
They also thought it was a good idea to recycle the heretical alter material which they broke down and ironically fashion into their own baptismal font, this stands in front of the statue. So much ‘heretical’ Roman materials are still in this church today its quite laughable….dont you think that even the creepy statue of St John looks a little pagan….?
During our wanderings around the Palace there are still reminders that people actively living here within these walls (as below) and in the city alleyways. Although Rosie does feel with the numbers of people trekking through, this will become less and less as this Palace turns more into a museum.
The outside of the Palace walls border half the length of The Riva and the Sea Gate, which was right on the waterfront back in Roman times takes you into the subterranean basement today. Look on the photos below at the wall, you can see the original exterior Roman columns of the Palace which have all been infilled to make apartments.
Diocletioans Palace became a UNESCO protected site in the 1970s, before then anything went in the way of knocking stuff down and adding new. Rosie does feel it all has been done quite sympathetically…it is all still old and it just adds to the layers time has left behind. By far the most magnificent layer is the original Roman remains, the Roman palace was everything it kind of isn’t today, grand, open and pure decadence.
Tucked away in a back alley of the Palace Rosie and The Operator had one of their best lunches ever whilst marveling at what we had seen and just learned. Ancient Split had certainly come alive today and it was amazing. Rosie recommends Split as a definite stop on any itinerary of Croatia!
Tomorrow we are sailing out of town to the Island of Korcula….we arrive in the dark due to Rosie mucking up the sailing timetable and once again not taking into consideration the reduced winter schedules. This wasted day on Korcula has taken the shine off it abit….but it means we do get to stay a day longer in Split.
