Croatia: A stroll through Diocletian’s Palace

We pulled off the ferry, and there we were standing on the waterfront in Split. It was the height of day, the sun blazed down. I tried to just calm the hell down, so I could absorb everything I could, be in the moment – take pictures, of course, but also be in the moment. (I felt that way the whole trip. Sometimes you just have to take a breath, calm down the buzz and momentum of travel, relax, so you can actually be present to the damn experience. At least I have to do that.) It was a madhouse on that waterfront: packed with crowds, with roaring huffing motorcycles, activity. There was a long building stretching down along the waterfront, with palm trees in front of it – and Ante pointed to it and said, “That’s Diocletian’s Palace.”

I stared at it, like, Wait, what? OKAY SHEILA FOCUS.

I had no idea it would look like that. I threw out my conception – based on years of reading about it and imagining it – and launched myself into absorbing reality. I highly recommend such an experience if you can swing it. It means you will have to staunchly AVOID photographs of the place you have always wanted to see, and that avoidance has to last years. So start now! I had somehow pictured it on a cliff. Wrong. I had also pictured it somewhat isolated. Wrong. And even though I KNEW the modern world had grown up around and within the Palace, I was still not prepared to see it so much a part of the city that cars were pulled up right against it, restaurants lined its front, etc. Ante pointed to the upper tier of the long building, stone, like a stage set, with blue sky peeking through the empty vacant windows. “That’s the Palace.” And, just like all the books said, perched on top of the walls, or peeking over them, were structures from a later date (but still from long long ago), stone “houses” and rooms, making the entire Palace a worm-hole through time, a place where past and far-past and Now all co-exist simultaneously.

The Palace is not a museum. You do not need to buy tickets to enter. You just walk in. It’s still a part of the city, with merchants and restaurants, shops, theatres, a strip joint, book stores … It never closes. It’s just THERE.

Ante did RIGHT by us, I can tell you that. He took us over to a little map of the Palace, so we could see what we were about to enter. The Palace was created with a big square wall around it (the “fort” element Ante mentioned in my first conversation with him), and each wall had a gate. Each gate had a different name (“Golden Gate” “Silver Gate”, etc.) Within those walls were huge structures, temples to Jupiter, his own quarters, an area that they think might have been a swimming/wading pool, etc. There were streets, passageways, etc. Ante took us through what was known as the basement door.

As Ante barreled us through the Palace, just to give us the lay of the land, providing historical context for many of the elements, he told us about what happened after Diocletian died, and the Roman Empire fell. The people who lived in the area didn’t leave. They continued to live in and around the Palace, building their own rickety shacks and buildings – some of which also remain, which is how you get this hallucinatory mix of eras. Like this:

Paraphrase of Ante’s speech as he took us around:

“The barbarians who lived here after did not know how to build anything right, so you can see the difference between the Romans and later. Diocletian persecuted Christians and so when the Christians arrived, they took what was his mausoleum and turned it into a church – there it is right there -”

“… and the Christians built a church over there too, over Diocletian’s quarters – but you can see how bad the construction is compared to the Romans. Not good.”

Ante made us see. So basically the early Christian tribes came and “disrespected” the man’s home by erecting Christian monuments over Roman monuments. Ante also told us as we came through the extraordinary basement that the barbarian tribes who moved in had dumped all their slop – and waste – down into this basement area. It was completely filled and not excavated until the 1950s. This was what was revealed when they finally cleared it all out:

So it’s an archeological site slash modern-Greenwich-Village-type neighborhood. People still live in there. You could see laundry hanging out to dry. Every nook and cranny is filled. The streets are this slippery … marble? … and at the end of every teeny alley you could see the wall of Diocletian’s Palace stretching up, sometimes with tiny slot-windows in them, showing the blue sky. It is one of the most fascinating places I’ve ever been. Everywhere I looked was some incongruity. That incongruity is the palace’s defining characteristic.

Ante showed us how a modern bank on one of the corners inside had one of the old columns of the palace coming through its lobby. So whoever came in after, from the Dark Ages to freakin’ yesterday, build AROUND the palace. We spent a couple days in Split, and we barely scratched the surface of all that was going on there. It was great, though, because our hotel was literally a one-minute walk away. So we could just go back for a quick nap, a shower, and then come back and wander around, go shopping, have a bite, whatever. Which is what we did.

There are big squares in the palace, lined with buildings. Ante told us which buildings were good, which ones were ugly. (I loved his tour guide style. “That building over there? Poured concrete. Pfft. Not good. Ugly.”) Here’s Ante, by the way.

Ante grew up in Split, so he kept running into friends. He was like the Mayor of Split. In one of the big squares is a statue of Renaissance-era Croatian poet Marko Marulić, done by Ivan Meštrović (a famous Croatian sculptor of the 20th century: we saw a lot of his stuff around, Ante would point it out. Ante loved Meštrović). Marko Marulić is credited with being the father of the Croatian Renaissance, and he hailed from Split. Here he is. His fingers are incredible, with big muscular knuckles, clutching his book.

Ante took us out of the Palace, through the Golden Gate (Zlatna Vrata), to point out how close our hotel was. We walked down a little side street and boom, there we were at the Zlatna Vrata.

This is natural light, just FYI. The gate truly is “golden.”

You can see the theatre nerds (God bless them, they’re everywhere) in gladiator costumes outside the gate.

The whole place is magic, but perhaps the most magic part is that the palace is not cut off from the surrounding community. If you went to college in Split, you could walk through it on your way to class, grab a coffee. You could sit there and study. You could stop by after work and have a drink. The palace has always been “open.” For almost 2,000 years. It remains open. So the Split residents are used to it. It’s part of their world, their backdrop. Like I’m sure the Coliseum is part of the world of those who live in Rome. Or, although not nearly as old, the Statue of Liberty is part of my everyday life. I see her every day on my commute. I’m not “over” her, but I’m certainly used to her presence.

My senses were on overload. I was so … happy. It takes me a while to even label the experience, and especially the kind I experienced in Split, since it’s so rare. Diocletian’s Palace … okay, so I’ve had a love affair with you in my head ever since I read Rebecca West’s travelogue of her trip through Yugoslavia. I said to myself, when I first read that 1,200 page book back in my 20s: “Okay, so Split, and that palace, I gotta see that one day.” I feel that way about so many places on the globe. I haven’t been anywhere. Well, I’ve been all over the United States, and I’ve been to Ireland many many times. But there are so many other places to see. Maybe this trip is a harbinger of things to come.