Day 113: Split

JULY 25 - I’ve been sort of dreading our visit to Split for a year. It is the one of the most visited cities in the country, and we are here at peak season. On the traveler forums I had seen people lamenting the tourist crush back in April and May, so I had no illusions about what awaited us.

Our day in Split began in Trogir. I had purchased round trip bus tickets for the 30 minute ride, going early and returning late, in hopes of getting as much seen as possible.

The only interesting thing to report on the bus trip was at the beginning, as we sat on the bus waiting to leave. The bus driver left at one point and began talking to a woman standing in the station. It looked to me like he was trying to hit on her. This carried on until the bus was scheduled to depart. When he got back on, he said to us “famous Croatian actress”. I looked her up online and it was Barbara Nola, who was indeed an actress who has played in a large number of Croatian movies and TV shows since about 1984. She is 53 now.

Croatia, in general, has become fantastically popular in the last ten years or so, and Split is a focus of that popularity. There seem to be many reasons for this. First, Split is a quite unique place, with a robust old city core. This core uses, in part, the floor plan of the Roman (retired) emperor Diocletian’s residence (r. 284-305), and has some well preserved remnants of Roman architecture. In general the city has a very walkable and vibrant waterfront, and has attained a status as a party destination for European youth. Then add the fact that parts of the city and surroundings were used for various scenes in Game of Thrones. Not having seen that series, though, I am rather oblivious to what locations they are taking about.

A few things have not kept up with the tourist demand. Though there appear to be hundreds of accommodation options, and flights are landing every 30 minutes or so at the Split airport, the main road connecting the highways inland with the bus/train station downtown is hopelessly clogged with traffic with completely inadequate routing. Our 30 minute bus ride this morning from Trogir spent an extra 30 minutes just trying to get across literally five blocks of downtown. The historic part of Split is walkable from the bus/train/ferry station, but that in turn makes it a constant push against the pedestrian mobs.

Just west of the transport stations is the open air market. This is a recurrent theme in Croatia, with lines of tables and red umbrellas overhead, selling mostly food. However, the tourist vendors, as seen in Zagreb, are also prominent, making it less like a traditional street market and more like another gauntlet of souvenir stalls.

As mentioned above, Diocletian’s Palace is the main focus of historical interest in Split. Diocletian himself is an interesting character and one of the more notable Roman emperors. He was born to a poor family in Dalmatia, joined the Roman military, and ‘rose through the ranks’, (a common attribute of many future emperors). When the current emperor Carus and his son both died while fighting the Persians, Diocletian was nominated by his own troops to take the job (also a common occurrence in the later Roman Empire). Of course, Carus had another son (Carinus) who opposed this, so first Diocletian had to march his troops against Carinus and defeat him first before fully entrenching himself as emperor.

Diocletian showed himself more than capable as a ruler, and is commonly credited with bringing desperately needed stability to the empire (ending a period known as The Crisis of the Third Century). He recognized that one of the biggest problems of the empire was that it was too large and complex for one person to focus on all at once. Hence, he created the Tetrarchy, which brought three other ‘co-emperors’ into the top governing echelon. In this way, he gave himself a free hand to focus on just one border (the east), and at the same time create a huge bureaucracy to deal with taxation and other economic matters.

Much of what Diocletian did bear fruit, with only a few failures. The Tetrarchy really only worked because he himself was not prone to the paranoia commonly seen with other emperors, who viewed ‘co-rule’ with great suspicion and were constantly looking for ways to undercut or assassinate ‘competitors’. His co-rulers, however, were not as magnanimous as he, and when Diocletian fell ill while on campaign in the Danube region, he was more or less pushed out of office. He took his retirement with the same measured selflessness as his rule, voluntarily abdicating in 305 CE. He was the first Roman emperor to leave office this way, that is, without dying in battle, of illness, being assassinated, or committing suicide. Despite the constant worry that he would be killed anyway, he retired to what is now Split, and his expansive palace we are visiting today. Even when some years later, having recovered from his illness and having been asked to return to power, he refused, commenting that he preferred to tend his vegetable garden on the palace grounds.

So, one more important aspect of Diocletian. He was one of the last pagan Roman emperors. He, like many in the empire at the time, considered Christianity to be a dangerous cult that needed to be suppressed. At the time it was growing quickly, threatening the traditional established order. It would not presented such a problem if the Christian god were just another deity among the hundreds currently worshiped. But of course the Christians were making much bigger claims than that, and its followers behaved in a radically different manner, viewing the emperor (and past deified emperors) as just people. All of this clearly acted against the perceived power of pagan gods and the leaders who identified with them. Diocletian himself was a devoted follower of Jupiter.

As might be expected, once Christianity took hold from the top down under Constantine the Great (r. 306-337), Diocletian was considered by Christians to be Public Enemy Number One (posthumously). His body, interred in the temple and mausoleum shown above, was summarily dumped out and an alter erected to St. Dominus, a former bishop from Salonica (a Roman city near Split) who was persecuted by Diocletian.

Another remarkable structure here is Jupiter’s Temple. As mentioned above, this god was dear to Diocletian’s heart, and his temple is just west of the peristyle.

Visit the palace museum, which has almost entirely Christian items left here during its long post-pagan history.

We stroll around more in the old palace grounds, most of which are now medieval to Renaissance buildings holding restaurants, bars, and just normal living city fare. Leave by the Iron Gate on the west side, and down to the boardwalk.

It was really hot by now, but we made an effort anyway to find some place for Odette to get in the ocean. A public waterfront area is just north of Sustipan Park, though there is little real ‘beach’ there, just rocks.

Catch a 19:30 bus back to Trogir. By then the exhausting heat has mostly worn off. We buy a snorkel and mask for Odette in the street market.