CC Travel Blog

Split’s life is inseperatable from its old town, which is also called the Diocletian’s Palace. The palace is the retirement home for Diocletian. Today, about 1500 people still live inside the palace. From the time the palace was built, the old town has lots of apartments built to accomodate for the servants that serve the retired empire.

We started our tour from the water front where today it is called the Riviera. If you browse through Split’s dining guide, most of them point to Riviera for great dining choices and night life hang out. Riviera is a broad street filled with open seats for cafe goers and shops.

There are four gates around the Palace and they’re named according to their importance. We entered through the Iron Gate which is along the Riviera. Iron Gate was used for Roman soldiers to enter the city, outside of the gate there is a broad road with a latin name “Decumanus” translated into meaning “10 arms length” because the Roman soldiers march by 10 people in a row.

Before teh Iron gate, we entered a square with apartments surrounding. On one side was an ancient palace structure and facing us is the clock tower and a double arch gate that the top walkway has access to apartments. The clock on the clock tower is quite old and we can still see that there are 24 roman letters. The double gate is a defense mechanicsm.

Once inside the city, the narrow cobble roads make the entire city like a maze. We followed the guide as she pointing out the different periods influences on the apartments.

Although the apartments look old outside, the inside could be elaborative and luxury, the guide told us. Per the city’s civil code, the apartments have to remain the same appearance from the exterior but the interior can be completely changed. For example, can you tell that the following one has 6 nuns living within and has an elevator?

With human habitat, it is obvious that there are water supplies such as wells dated back to the 15th century. Today the wells are part of a museum from the Large Papalic Palace.

We cut through the city and reached another side, the Golden Gate. Golden Gate is for important people to enter the city. But today, from the look of it, I can hardly tell that it is “golden.” Outside of the gate there is a brozen statue which is the work from Ivan Mestrovic, a famous artist in Croatia. His unique style of scripture is to have long fingers and stern faces on each of his works.

Re-enter the city and we headed to the Silver Gate, where most of the tour focus is.

Silver Gate is also called the Eastern Gate, which was dedicated to St. Apollinaire, a saint worshipped all over the Mediterranean world during the Early Christian period. The sentry corridor above the Silver Gate was transformed into a church around 6th century, so that the patron saint could protect the entrance to the city by his super power.

Between the Silver Gate and the octangular shape church there is a square which was used for town hall meetings of the city.

The octangular church (St. Dominus Cathedral) used to be a pagan temple and later on converted to be a Christian church. The first priest, Dominus was beheaded by Diocletians and today sarcophagus and relics of Dominus were placed inside the church.

Once inside the cathedral, I adorned the details completely; black marble columns, round dom top that used to be garnished with white marbles, two side chapesl for Dominus, the 800 year old walnut wood door with panels of stories of Jesus. The capacity of the cathedral is only 100 people; with such a small size and high historical value, the guard on the door watched every visitor like a hawk with additional security cameras on the roof. No pictures allowed. I was also surprised by the structure of the cathedral, although octangular outside, inside was round shape room.

Outside of the cathedral is a square where an Egyptian black marble sphinx was displayed with black and white marble columns. This is the stage for Diocletian to show off his power.

Jupiter Temple was nearby which today it is locked with no use. The temple is rather bare inside with only a St. John the Baptist statue and a cross shape baptistry pool.

On the front of the pool was a relief crafting the status ranking of bishop, king and the common people. The name of the temple was also kept from the Greeks who worshipped their Jupiter God.

Next to the Cathedral is the Entry Vestibule, which is the grand entry to Diocletian’s living quarters. At around 10.30am, a band will perform a cappella harmony here.

From the Jupiter Temple and the Cathedral towards the water is the gateway to the basement. The basement is the most well-kept part of the city. According to the old map, the basement opens up to the sea.

The basement today becomes a street of souvenior shops for the front part, but walking pass the shops the remaining of the basement was kept for display.

Near the entrance of the display, there is a well to show where the sea level was when the palace was right outside the water. In the exact spot, I wanted to rearrange my clothes and suddenly the stupid headset fell into the well! The headset was part of the tour and it cost 80 Euros to replace it! Thank goodness the staff fished it out right away.

This is the basement. It was unknown to the world that there is a basement to the old town for a few centuries until the discovery. At that time, the entire basement was used for storage and the stuff were up to its ceiling. All the stones and bricks we saw are the originals.

At the end of the basement hung a “gold plate” to show the face of Diocletian. Until we reached out to touch it that we found out it was made of tin.

Inside the basement, one part of it has a wood log there to show the structure of the basement.

The exit of the basement is the 4th gate, the Bronze Gate.

After the tour, we spent some free time wandering around, exploring the maze town. Unlike a lot of countries where the old town becomes a tourist trap and the locals move to the new town, Croatians live in the old town like how their ancestors did.

At the corner of the Silver Gate is their fish market. It was a very lively scene with merchants yelling and locals bargaining, asking questions and talking.

We walked further away from the palace and entered the local flea market where you can find anything from clothes to daily utilities. An old lady was selling hand made lace, which is a traditional Croatian souvenir.

Just like another Asian street market.

As the day progresses to near noon, Riviera (Riva) becomes more and more crowded. The taste of Croatian life is here!