We are planning to spend a few days around Split using it as a base to explore some of the off shore islands as well as the city itself. Today we headed down to the city center to check it out and scout the best options to get to the off shore islands.
Split is an old town going back thousands of years. Today it is a sprawling modern city of 160,000 people. A lot of the apartment blocks go back to the communist era and to put it nicely are not very pretty. I think the term for the architecture from this period is Brutalist and that is an apt description.
Our first stop as often happens is the city market. There was nothing particularly remarkable about this market. It was the usual mixture of meat and vegetables with a few local artisans showing their goods. Ton found a pair of pretty fingerless gloves to replace the ones that have gone missing at home at one of the artisans shops.
Splits old town is pretty compact and can be covered in a couple of hours of walking. Split is known for two things its Cathedral and Diocletian’s Palace.
The Cathedral and the Palace are kind of mixed together as the mausoleum of the palace was converted to a Christian Church in the third century and the cathedral grew up around it.
Diocletian was a Roman emperor in the third century who was born in this area. He gets mixed reviews as he left the remains of this beautiful palace for us all to share which is a plus. The minus it was built by Christian slaves in 10 years at great cost to the slaves who Diocletian was trying to get to renounce Christianity because he believed he was a child of Jupiter.
History is always complicated in the Balkans.
After walking around for a while we decided to head over to the waterfront for a lunch. Ton was deciding which meal to order when she asked the waiter the difference between two local fish, he replied they are like brother and sister, so she asked which one was the sister? This cracked the Croatian guy up at the next table, and caused our waiter to blush a little. We ended up with another excellent meal that had us skipping dinner later in the day.
We took one more pass thru the old town, cathedral, and palace. We noticed that another cruise ship had put into town so we decided to head on back to the campground.
