Split: The Living Palace

The Riva promenade you're standing on was remade in its current form in eighteen twenty-six, when the Austrians widened and paved the seafront. But the logic of this waterfront is much older. The south face of the palace — the wall you are looking at right now — was originally built directly at the water's edge. There was no promenade. There was a sea wall, and beyond it, the Adriatic. Ships docked against the palace itself. Sailors unloaded luxury goods directly through the Bronze Gate into the cellars beneath the palace floor. The emperor could, in theory, watch his imported goods arrive from his bedroom window.

The palace was built between approximately two hundred and ninety-five and three oh five AD. The man who commissioned it was Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus — Diocletian. He was born around two hundred and forty-four AD in a town called Salona, just a few kilometres north of where you're standing, to a family of modest means. His father was possibly a scribe, possibly a freed slave. The historical sources disagree. What they agree on is that Diocletian rose through the ranks of the Roman military with extraordinary ability and ruthlessness, and in two hundred and eighty-four AD, after a sequence of events involving his predecessor's assassination, his troops declared him emperor.

He ruled for twenty-one years — a remarkable reign in an era when emperors were routinely killed after months in office. He reorganised the empire, divided it administratively into four parts, restructured the tax system, and launched the last and most systematic persecution of Christians in Roman history. Then, in three oh five AD, he voluntarily retired. He was the only Roman emperor to ever do so. He came home to Dalmatia, to this palace he had been building for a decade, and spent the last eight or nine years of his life here — growing vegetables, refusing to return to politics, and dying peacefully, probably in three twelve AD.

The palace dimensions tell you something about the man's ambitions: two hundred and fifteen metres from east to west, one hundred and eighty-one metres from north to south. Not a house. A small city. It had four gates, two main streets crossing at right angles, a mausoleum for the emperor, a temple, barracks, apartments for the court, and underground cellars supporting the entire floor above. Somewhere between eight and ten thousand people may have lived and worked inside these walls during Diocletian's time.

Look at the wall again. See the blind arcades — the decorative arched niches along the facade? That upper gallery, running the full length of the south wall, was Diocletian's private loggia. He sat up there and looked at this same water you are looking at now. The view has changed. The sea wall has become a promenade. The ships docking against the wall are now tour boats. But the geometry of sea, wall, and sky is essentially unchanged.

We are going to walk through that wall now. Head toward the Bronze Gate, the arched entrance directly ahead of you in the centre of the south facade. That is where we begin.

Through this arch, for as long as Diocletian lived here, goods arrived from across the Roman world. Amphorae of olive oil from North Africa. Wine from the Aegean. Spices from the east. Silk, ivory, amber. The Roman empire's supply chain ran through this opening, and everything that arrived here was carried down the ramp just inside and stored in the cellars immediately beneath the emperor's living quarters. The logistics of imperial comfort flowed through an unglamorous arch in a sea wall.

Look at the gate itself. The stonework is Roman — large, precisely cut blocks of local limestone from the island of Brač, the same pale white stone that was later used to build Diocletian's mausoleum and, centuries after that, would be shipped to Washington to help build the White House. The arch you're passing through is original Roman construction. The vaulting above your head as you step inside dates to the early fourth century AD.

Notice how the space changes the moment you cross the threshold. The promenade, the open Adriatic light, the tourist cafés — all of that disappears instantly. You step into a vaulted passage, the ceiling drops, the stone closes around you, and you are, for a disorienting moment, inside something genuinely ancient. Not restored, not reconstructed — inside.

The passage through the Bronze Gate leads directly into the cryptoporticus, the vaulted underground corridor that runs east to west beneath the palace floor. To your right and left, arched openings lead into the cellars — the Podrum — which we will explore at the next stop. Above your head, invisible through the stone vaulting, is the ground level of the palace where Diocletian walked.

One more thing to notice before we move on. Look at the wall to your left and right as you enter. Medieval and post-medieval building has encrusted itself directly onto the Roman stonework. You can see where later walls were built against the Roman ones, where windows were punched through ancient masonry, where the medieval city grew inside the Roman one the way a new city grows inside an old one everywhere — by reusing what was already standing. In Split, that process began in the seventh century and has never stopped.

We go deeper now. Follow the corridor ahead into the Podrum — the palace cellars.

Walk through these spaces and you are, in effect, walking through a ghost of the palace as it was in three oh five AD. The dimensions of the rooms above. The arrangement of the corridors. The position of the main halls relative to the sea gate. All of it readable down here in stone.

For most of the medieval period and well into the modern era, these cellars were used as a dump. The inhabitants of the city above threw their rubbish down through openings in the floor, and over the centuries the entire Podrum filled up to the vaulting with accumulated waste. It was not until the nineteen fifties and sixties that systematic excavation cleared the cellars and revealed their extraordinary state of preservation. Archaeologists found objects from every century of occupation — Byzantine coins, medieval pottery, Ottoman artefacts, Renaissance metalwork — essentially a stratigraphy of everything the people living above had discarded over a thousand years.

If these chambers look familiar to you from somewhere else, there is a reason. Between seasons three and six of Game of Thrones, this is where the dragon cages were filmed. Daenerys kept her dragons chained in these vaults. The production team chose the Podrum because it needed no dressing — the vaulted stone chambers, the darkness, the scale, the sense of something ancient and slightly threatening — it was all already here. Millions of television viewers have seen this space without knowing where it was.

But the cellars are more important than any filming location. They are the only surviving record of the palace's original spatial organisation. Archaeologists have been able to reconstruct, from the cellars, the positions of the main reception halls, the dining rooms, the private apartments, the colonnaded gallery along the sea front. Everything that stood above — the floors, the marble cladding, the mosaic pavements, the roof — was stripped, recycled, and built into the medieval city. Only the underground foundation survived intact.

Take a moment to walk deeper into the chambers. Listen to the acoustics. In some sections you can hear music echoing through the vaulting from buskers in the Peristyle above. The stone carries sound across seventeen centuries without any effort at all.

When you're ready, we head up into the light. Follow the stairs toward the Vestibule.

The Vestibule was the formal anteroom to Diocletian's private apartments. You entered here before being admitted to the emperor's presence. The space was originally roofed — a full hemispherical dome covered in mosaic that would have glittered in the light of oil lamps. The floor was marble. The walls were faced with coloured stone. This was a space designed to communicate imperial power before you had even seen the emperor, a room that told you, in the language of expensive materials and architectural perfection, exactly where you stood in the order of things.

Here, in the Vestibule, is where one of the most significant rituals of late Roman imperial life was performed: the adoratio. Subjects who were granted an audience with Diocletian were required to prostrate themselves flat on the ground before him — a full prostration, forehead to floor. This was not a Roman tradition. It was Persian. Diocletian imported it deliberately, as part of a comprehensive reimagining of what the Roman emperor was. Previous emperors had been, in theory, first citizens — first among equals, magistrates with exceptional power. Diocletian made the emperor something different: a semi-divine figure, set apart from ordinary humanity, approached with the ceremony of a god.

He was the first Roman emperor to demand this. He was also the first to require that his subjects address him as Dominus et Deus — Lord and God. The adoratio in this room was not empty ritual. It was the physical enactment of a new political theology. You did not just acknowledge Diocletian's power. You expressed it with your body, pressing yourself into the floor of his anteroom.

The dome above you is roughly ten metres across. Look at the rings of brickwork rising from the drum to the open oculus. The construction technique is Roman — tile courses alternating with rubble and mortar, a building method that could produce curved surfaces of extraordinary precision. The exterior drum still shows the stumps of engaged columns that once articulated the outer wall. The whole structure is a reduced version of the Pantheon's logic: a circular domed room that focuses the eye upward toward light.

Now, standing here with birds circling through the open dome and the sounds of the city coming in from all sides, think about what happened in this room. An emperor who had run the Roman world for two decades, who had reorganised its administration, restructured its military, and launched the most systematic persecution of a religious minority in ancient history — this man stood here, in the doorway to his private apartments, and watched his subjects press their faces to this floor.

He died about nine years after abdicating, probably around three hundred and twelve AD. The exact circumstances of his death are unknown. So is the location of his tomb, which is a mystery we will address at the next stop. For now, step outside into the Peristyle.

And it was on this stage — or, more precisely, on the first day of May, three oh five AD — that one of the most remarkable events in Roman imperial history occurred. Diocletian voluntarily abdicated.

He stood here, in front of his assembled court and army, removed the purple imperial robe, and retired to private life. He was the only emperor in Roman history to do this willingly. Every other emperor who left office did so because he was dead, assassinated, or overthrown. Diocletian chose to leave. He was about sixty years old, reportedly in poor health, and he had decided he had done enough.

His co-emperor Maximian abdicated the same day, under what historical sources suggest was considerable pressure from Diocletian. The transition was designed to be orderly — Diocletian had been planning it for years, and the administrative structure of the Tetrarchy, the four-person governing system he had created, was supposed to continue smoothly after his departure.

It did not. Within a few years of his abdication, the Tetrarchy collapsed into civil war. Generals fought for control. Constantine eventually emerged victorious, converted to Christianity, and moved the empire's capital to Constantinople. Everything Diocletian had built — the administrative system, the price edicts, the religious policy, the Tetrarchy itself — was dismantled. He lived long enough to watch most of it happen.

He stayed here, in this palace, and grew vegetables. This is not a metaphor. He actually grew cabbages. When his former colleagues and generals sent messengers begging him to return to power and restore stability, he replied — and this is recorded in the historical sources — with one of the most famous refusals in political history: if you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn't dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never-satisfied greed.

He chose cabbages over empire. He died in his retirement palace, on this coast, and was buried nearby. His successors immediately began fighting over the Roman world he had left behind.

Today the Peristyle is Split's central square. Cafés occupy the colonnaded spaces where the emperor's court once processed. In the evenings in summer, concerts are held here and the acoustics, bouncing off two-thousand-year-old stone, are remarkable. Locals sit here the way locals sit in town squares everywhere, which is exactly what Diocletian's refugees did in the seventh century when they moved in: they took an imperial ceremonial space and turned it into a neighbourhood.

Then the refugees arrived in the seventh century. The Western Roman Empire had collapsed. The city of Salona, a few kilometres north, had been destroyed by Avars and Slavs. The survivors fled south, found this enormous abandoned palace, moved in, and began adapting it to their needs. One of the most pressing needs was a place of Christian worship. They converted the emperor's mausoleum into a church.

The theological irony is almost too neat to be accidental. Diocletian launched what historians call the Great Persecution — the last and most systematic attempt by the Roman state to eliminate Christianity. Beginning in three oh three AD, he ordered churches destroyed, scriptures burned, Christian clergy arrested, and ultimately required all citizens of the empire to sacrifice to the traditional Roman gods under pain of death. The persecution lasted until three thirteen AD, a year after Diocletian's own death.

Among those killed was Domnius — Sveti Duje — the first Bishop of Salona. He was martyred in three oh four AD, during the height of the persecution, almost certainly on Diocletian's orders. He died for refusing to abandon the religion that the emperor was trying to destroy.

His bones are now preserved in a reliquary inside the emperor's mausoleum. The bishop's remains rest in the tomb of the man who had him killed. The cathedral dedicated to his memory was built inside the monument the emperor built for himself. And the city that grew up around both of them is named, in its Croatian form, after the ancient Roman city whose bishop Diocletian murdered.

This is not a coincidence or an oversight. It was a deliberate act of theological triumphalism by the early Christian community: we have converted your tomb into our church, your mausoleum into our cathedral, and the bishop you martyred watches over the place where you expected to be worshipped.

The exterior colonnade — those Corinthian columns encircling the building — is original Roman work, dating to the early fourth century. The campanile, the tall bell tower standing beside the cathedral, was built between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. It is one of the finest Romanesque bell towers in Dalmatia, and climbing it offers the best view of the palace's plan from above. The carved frieze running around the exterior of the mausoleum just below the roof depicts hunting scenes and portraits — one of which is believed to be Diocletian himself, though scholars debate this. If it is him, then the emperor's face has been staring down from the walls of a Christian cathedral for the past seventeen centuries.

Step back and look at the whole composition: Roman columns, medieval tower, Baroque additions, ancient stone. Split in one building.

That continuous use is the other story of this building. In the sixth century — within two or three hundred years of Diocletian's death — the temple was converted into a Christian baptistery. The font was installed where the cult statue of Jupiter had stood. The building that Diocletian had built to worship the supreme Roman god was repurposed for the initiation rite of the religion he had tried to destroy.

Look at the sarcophagus in the apse. It is medieval, carved in the eleventh century, and it contains — according to tradition — the relics of Saint John the Baptist. The head of a Roman pagan temple became a Christian baptistery, which then acquired the relics of the prophet who performed the first baptism. The layers of meaning here are extraordinary.

The porch outside, with its two Corinthian columns and its triangular pediment, is one of the best-preserved Roman temple facades in the Adriatic world. Notice the sphinx in front of the porch — one of two that flanked the entrance to the temple precinct. Sphinxes were imported from Egypt by the Romans as signs of imperial prestige. Diocletian, who had campaigned in Egypt and understood its symbolic vocabulary, brought several sphinxes to his palace. This one has survived. Others were found in the cellars during excavation.

Now look up at the barrel vault one more time. The coffered ceiling. The precision of the carving. This was built by craftsmen who had no idea that their work would survive for seventeen hundred years, and it has survived because other people, in other centuries with other beliefs, kept using it. That is the whole story of Split in miniature: not preservation but continuous use. Not a museum but a city.

We leave the palace's internal sacred spaces now and walk to the north. To the Golden Gate.

The gate was blocked and converted into a church in the early medieval period, which is why the original vaulted passage through it is not accessible from this side today. You can re-enter the palace through it from the interior, but standing out here on the north side, you see the full Roman composition with medieval additions layered on top — exactly the palimpsest that characterises everything in Split.

Now look to your left. That enormous bronze figure is Grgur Ninski — Gregory of Nin — and he has nothing to do with Diocletian. He is eight and a half metres tall and was cast by Ivan Meštrović in nineteen twenty-nine. Meštrović was the greatest Croatian sculptor of the twentieth century, and this statue is his most famous public work.

Gregory of Nin was a medieval Croatian bishop who lived in the tenth century. He championed a cause that sounds, from this distance, almost absurdly modest: he wanted Croatian priests to be able to conduct the Mass in Croatian rather than Latin. In the tenth century, this was a profound challenge to the authority of Rome, which required Latin as the universal liturgical language of the Western church. Gregory fought for the use of Glagolitic script — the oldest Slavic alphabet — and the Croatian vernacular in worship. He was repeatedly in conflict with the papacy over this, and he ultimately lost the formal argument. But his cause survived in Croatian church practice for centuries, and he became a symbol of Croatian cultural and linguistic identity.

Meštrović placed this statue outside the Golden Gate in nineteen twenty-nine as a deliberate statement: a Croatian medieval bishop standing before a Roman emperor's gate, asserting cultural continuity and national identity. The statue was moved during the Italian occupation of Split in World War Two — the Italians found it politically inconvenient — and returned after the war.

Look at Grgur's right foot, or rather at his left big toe, which is the one facing you. It is golden. Not from gold leaf — from seventeen centuries worth of people rubbing it. The tradition of rubbing Grgur's toe for good luck has polished it to a warm bronze gleam that stands out clearly against the rest of the patinated figure. Nobody knows exactly when this tradition started, but it has been going long enough to literally wear the bronze smooth.

Touch the toe. It costs nothing and the odds are already in your favour simply by being in Split on a day like this.

But the Silver Gate is not primarily what this stop is about. Step outside the gate, or look through it from inside, and you are looking at the Pazar.

The Pazar is the daily outdoor market of Split, and it has operated on this ground for approximately seventeen hundred years. That is not a marketing claim or a romantic approximation. The location of the market immediately outside the eastern gate of the palace was established in the early medieval period, when the inhabitants of the palace-city first began trading with the population of the surrounding region, and it has been here ever since. Seventeen hundred years of daily commerce on the same patch of ground.

Every morning, farmers from the surrounding villages and islands arrive at the Pazar with whatever is in season. In summer: figs, tomatoes, courgettes, peaches, the extraordinary Dalmatian stone fruits that grow nowhere else with quite the same sweetness. In spring: wild asparagus gathered from the hillsides, fresh young onions, lamb. In autumn: pomegranates, late grapes, dried figs, honey, olive oil. In winter: root vegetables, citrus from the coast, dried herbs.

The lavender is always here. Dalmatian lavender — the cultivar grown on the island of Hvar and the surrounding hills — is considered among the finest in the world, with a particularly high linalool content that gives it a sweeter, less camphorous scent than the lavender grown in France or England. Women sit at the market selling small cloth bags of dried lavender and bundles of the fresh herb, and the fragrance carries all the way back through the Silver Gate and into the palace.

The flowers are always here too. Cut flowers from the greenhouses and gardens of the Dalmatian coast, arranged with the particular Croatian aesthetic that involves a great deal of colour and no apparent interest in restraint.

Stand here for a moment and think about continuity. The people trading here today are doing, in the same place, what their distant predecessors were doing when the Byzantine Empire was the major power in the Adriatic. When the Venetians ruled this coast. When Napoleon's forces briefly occupied the city. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire administered Dalmatia. Through all of it, every morning, the market opened at the Silver Gate.

We make our way back south and west now for the final stop. To the Prokurative.

The Prokurative was built during a period of intense cultural and political complexity on this coast. The Austrian Empire controlled Dalmatia, but the population was Croatian, and the cultural politics of the late nineteenth century involved competing claims of Italian, Croatian, and Venetian identity. The architectural language of the Prokurative is deliberately Italian — it speaks the language of St. Mark's Square because Venice had defined the visual culture of the Adriatic coast for centuries. But it was built for, and immediately claimed by, the Croatian city.

Today the Prokurative is Split's outdoor living room. In summer, the square hosts concerts, festivals, outdoor cinema, and the endless evening passeggiata — the slow walk, the stopping to talk, the watching of other people walking and stopping to talk — that is the defining social ritual of every city on this coast. The cafés under the colonnades are full from morning until midnight. During the Split Summer Festival, opera and theatre are performed in the square, and the acoustics, bouncing off three sides of Neo-Renaissance stone with the Adriatic as a backdrop, are extraordinary.

Stand here and look back the way you came. Two hundred metres to your east, the Roman palace wall rises above the Riva. What you are standing in was built fifteen hundred years after what you can see from here. Split is not a city with a Roman past. It is a city that contains multiple complete civilisations simultaneously, all of them still in use.

That is the thing about this place that is hardest to communicate to someone who has not stood in it. In other cities, the ancient and the modern are separated — the ancient is cordoned off, protected, visited, preserved. Here they are not separated. Here a Roman emperor's mausoleum is also the city's active cathedral. Here a Venetian Neo-Renaissance square stands next to a Roman palace wall, and the space between them is a promenade where the same people walk every evening. Here three thousand people sleep inside walls that were already a thousand years old when the medieval city was founded.

Split is not a museum. It never has been. And that, more than any individual monument or historical fact, is what makes it unlike anywhere else in the world.

Thank you for walking through it with me.