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Published: August 16th 2019
Our next stop turned in to a longer one as we stayed five nights near the city of Split. What kept here this long was a combination of an interesting place to visit, great stores for provisioning and two days of storms moving through. We had a great hook and even met some people at anchor here so we were not in a rush.
We arrived at the anchorage before noon so it gave us time that first day to take the dinghy ashore and get acquainted with the town and what it has to offer. We have the Rick Steves Croatia guidebook and we already had a bit of information on what we would be seeing and figured that the next day we would follow his walking tour. While walking around there were plenty of vendors hawking their services such as tours of the city and other trips in the area. One attracted our attention as it was a walking tour but when we asked how many people they would take in a groups we were told 30-40 people. That decided us against it for two reasons - one is that we have been walking the streets and knew
how narrow they were so it could be difficult to get near the guide to hear as they did not use microphones. The second was with Bob being hard of hearing it would have been very frustrating. Decision was made to do the walk by ourself reading the information from the book as he didn’t had an audio guide for it, but then we found another company that offered private walking tours. That sounded much better and it would only cost a total of $15 more than the previously offered group tour. We were sold and booked it for the following morning. We were very happy with the result. Our guide, Ivan, was excellent providing us with the history that we wanted to learn as well as eager to answer any questions we had. At the end of the tour we even went for a coffee with him as we were enjoying talking to him as a local, not as a guide.
Today Split is the second largest city in Croatia but has a long history back to the Romans. One man in particular, the Roman Emperor, Diocletian (245-313) was responsible for the development here in Split. He was
born in a nearby village and when he retired as Roman Emperor after 20 years of reign he wanted to build a palace near the sea and his home village. He built his palace complex as two structures, his own personal villa and the rest was a fortified Roman town. We have been to other Roman ruins, but here in Split more of the original remained as well as they have done quite a bit of reconstruction making it easier to get a feel for what it would have been like. They do not have many historical markers here so it made having the guide even more important to have a better understanding of what we were seeing.
We learned that Diocletian is most remembered for two things which were not that favorable things to have as his legacy. The first was that he decided to divide the Roman Empire among four Emperors to make it easier to administer, but in fact it helped speed up the downfall of the empire. The second was that he tortured and executed Christians killing many along the coast here. Thankfully his reign was followed by Constantine who legalized Christianity and made it
Passed the Market on the Way into Town
but too early and too hot to buy anything unfortunatelythe official religion of the empire making Diocletian's actions against Christians the last for the Roman Empire.
On this point there was quite the irony as Diocletian had built himself a very elaborate octagonal mausoleum, but after the fall of Rome it was converted to a Cathedral. The center of the interior of the Cathedral would have been where Diocletian's tomb would have been. Now the only thing that remains of his sarcophagus are a couple small red marble pillars as no one knows where his remains now are. The irony is not only that his tomb is now a Cathedral, but also that the Bishop Domnius of Salona who was killed by Diocletian is now worshipped here and his sarcophagus is here instead. The bell tower that now stands next to the Cathedral was added over a period of three centuries (13-16th C) and is a landmark in the city now.
Fortunately there was a diagram of what the palace had looked like that helped as we wandered through the ruins of the palace. With the palace's location current day Split is intertwined with the old so you many times have to picture the palace without the
The Fish Market Wasn't Too Busy
but we got here later in the day current day buildings in the center of it. It must have been quite an impressive place indeed.
I won't describe all of the areas of the palace that we saw, but a couple that were quite interesting I'll try to describe. The cellars of the palace were only recently discovered during the last century and are providing much more information to archeologist today. The palace was built on land that sloped down to the sea and as such they had to build a massive support system for the buildings above. Over the years this area had been used as a dump which helped preserve the area and provides valuable information now. It now houses numerous shops selling lots of souvenir items, but you can still get a feel for the size of the supports and the construction method used.
The other area of interest was the grand entrance to the palace. There was a square in front of the entry vestibule. It has red granite pillars that were brought from Egypt and there is even a black Sphinx that seems out of place here, but there had been as many as 13 in Diocletian's collection. These sphinx date
from 3500 years ago and three have survived, 2 being here and one is in a museum. He spent many years in Egypt and wanted some reminders of his time there. I always seem to marvel at the distances items traveled and in particular the types of things that were brought by ship in order to tell others of your wealth and status.
It is always interesting to see how these buildings that have weathered the test of time were built. There were a few places that you could see the ingenuity of how blocks of stone were made to be interlocking without the need of mortar. As the guide pointed them out he referred to them as “lego blocks”. We have seen these in other places as well, but it reminds us of how advanced civilizations before us were. Sometimes we forget that their abilities to build with the materials they had to gather and move into place without the conveniences of today. The building was made from white limestone and marble from the island of Brac as well as near Trogir here in Croatia, tufa was extracted from nearby riverbeds and the bricks were made in local
workshops. Egyptian granite columns and other marble were imported for the finer details in the Palace.
In the 7
th C. Diocletian’s home town had been destroyed by various invasions so the population that remained found shelter in the palace walls changing much of it for residential use. During the 12-14
th C. the bell tower was built and many shops and more residences were established. Some of those buildings are the ones you see today.
On Sunday we went back into town to check out a few more places that we did not tour the day before, but had been told about by our guide. One of those places was Jupiter's Temple. There had been four temples within the Palace but this one survived. When the mausoleum had been converted to a cathedral, this temple was changed over to being St. John's Baptistery. Within its walls there is a full immersion font from the 12th C. with nautical traditional rope designs reminding you of the heritage of Croatia.
The entrance vestibule to the living quarters was meant to impress which it still does today. Emperors believed themselves to be gods and Diocletian was no exception. He called himself
"Jovius" , the son of Jupiter , the most powerful of gods. He would stand at his entrance four times a year and speak to his subjects. We were told that they would have to lay on the floor of the square in front of the entrance with their hands on the floor in front of him in pray, but also it was believed in this way he would know they did not have any weapons. The entranceway is completely round and reminds you of the Pantheon in Rome. He wanted people to be as impressed of his entrance as they did of what he modeled his after. Currently there is a hole in the ceiling again reminding you of the Pantheon, but it had been covered with a dome and the interior was covered with frescoes and mosaics. When we walked through there were four gentlemen sitting next to a sign noting that they are Klapa singers. These are traditionally male a Capella singers beautifully harmonizing numerous songs about love. We were told that we might find them here as the acoustics in this vestibule are excellent. There were two chairs there which we sat down in and thankfully
they decided to sing. Their voices were beautiful and even if you can't understand the words the emotion came through. We had a chance to talk to them as well to find out more about Klapa music. We were pleased to hear that they told us that there are still young people interested in continuing the tradition. We gladly bought a CD from them so we can bring a taste of Croatian music home with us. It was definitely a treat as we had tried to hear Klapa music when we were in Korcula and was not able to. We were definitely hoping that we would before we left Croatia.
We found out when we were walking around that the Palace was used as a location for the filming of the 4
th season of the Games of Thrones so there is even a museum for those of you that find this of interest – we definitely didn’t but we could tell that there were many that came to Split for that reason – as we say, each to their own. We were much more interested in the history of the area as our walking tour filled the bill for
us.
We were glad that we did our tour the previous day as there was a cruise ship in town so the town was much more crowded so after seeing what we wanted to we headed back to the boat. With anchoring out you use your dinghy more and as a result we decided to fill a jerry can with gasoline as there was a gas station within easy walking distance. We are finding that it seems that there are numerous large grocery stores close by as well so thought this would be the best time to stock up on any heavy items we need as well as our regular needs for fruit and vegetables.
We probably would have left the next day, but the weather told us otherwise. We wound up having two storms go through with plenty of wind, rain and waves. The anchorage here is quite large and it wasn't very crowded with boats. All the anchors held and everyone road out the storms well. Storms always add some stress to anchoring out but knock on wood we have been fortunate so far. At the end of one of them we happened to notice a
pair of oars from a dinghy float by so Bob hopped in our dinghy and did a rescue. He then had to figure out what boat they belonged to. He saw a dinghy missing its oars so stopped by the boat to return them. They hadn't realized they were missing them so they were very pleased to get them back. Always a nice feeling to be able to do a good deed for someone. Hope if the tables were reverse, someone would do the same for us.
There were a few boats in the anchorage and the first day we went over to the one with the Australian flag as we knew they would speak English and we might be able to get some tips of where to shop and to take the dinghy ashore - always useful pieces of information when coming to a new anchorage. John and Sandra invited us onboard and we enjoyed our conversation with them. We had thought we'd get together again another day and it worked out that they made it over to Tsamaya. It is always great to meet new people and share ideas. We never know when our paths will cross
again with people we meet so I keep a file with boat cards from everyone with notes on where we met. It has been useful numerous times (and with our memories getting older it may be even more useful in the future)!
Whenever we have been in an anchorage a few days and we are comfortable with the holding and what is available on shore, Bob says, "we are never leaving here", but then reality hits and we know we need to move on so the next morning we pulled up anchor and were on our way. We really enjoyed our time in Split, but there are more places to visit.
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