split, diocletian's palace

*the roughly composited images above give a sense of the palace's development. The image to the left superimposes red (extant structure) over black (original structure). The image to the right superimposes black (original structure) over red (current structure).

Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus constructed his palace on the Adriatic Sea between 293 and 305 AD, in time for his planned abdication from the imperial throne. He chose the site under several considerations. The first was his political reform, the empire’s East-West division under a tetrarchical political format. [1] Spalatum, in the very center of the eastern coast of the Adriatic, had always been a natural boundary between West and East and from this vantage the Emperor would be able, even after his abdication, to follow the development of his political innovations. The second was a desire for proximity to Salonae, his birthplace. The site’s natural conditions were highly favorable. The deep south-facing inlet was sheltered form the north by the Dinaric mountains and from the south by central Dalmatia’s off-shore islands. Nearby were excellent limestone quarries. Finally, the sulphur springs, almost within the Palace itself, were famous for their medicinal properties and still manage to make the southwest corner reek of rotten eggs.


Split has been an odd jumble of domestic, military, religious, and urban design from its imperial inception. Initially, it served not only as a retirement home to the abdicated Diocletian but also as a temple to his deity status, cared for and protected by the provided urban population. The complex’s typological ambiguities have played out across the centuries.

After Diocletian’s death, the palace passed through successive imperial hands largely intact. In the 7th century, the palace’s transformation to its present state began when the Avars and Slavs destroyed Salonae, compelling a considerable faction of the city’s surviving citizens to take refuge within the palace walls. This wave of inhabitation provided the kernel for a new city—Split—which grew through adaptation and alteration as well as through outgrowths and satellite constructions.

The Venetian Republic engulfed Split from 1420 until the republic’s abolition in 1797, building trade facilities and intensifying fortifications. From Venice, Split passed to Austria and then, from 1806 to 1813, to Napoleon. The French altered the interior, demolished much of the Venetian city wall, and regularized the embankment and park system. The fall of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy bequeathed Split to what became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and, finally, Split was linked with the continental European centers by railway in 1925, hastening its belated modernization.

This is the very railway I arrived on and, for the past few days, I have been exploring the palace, which is currently under Croatian control. I followed up a string of festivals by rolling in during Sudamja, the feast of St. Dominius. Ceremonies began in Diocletian’s mausoleum, the core of his emperor cult which was later re-named for the city’s patron saint and elevated to cathedral status.[2]

The Feast of St. Domnius, held each year on May 7, remains Split’s grandest celebration day and is comprised of mass, a procession, a feast, a grand game of bingo, and fireworks. The procession begins in the peristyle pictured at center and exits the palace through the eastern gate along the decumanus that divided the palace in twain. Originally, the southern half belonged to the imperial suites and cult and the northern half to servants and a defensive garrison. During the medieval era this same road facilitated urban growth beyond the western wall’s protective boundary. Perhaps for this reason the eastern stretch of road remains wider and its gate left bare, the better to process through. The proud citizenry then rounds the wall south and strides west along the waterfront. With too expansive a population to squeeze within the palace’s modest confines, mass and most festivities now take place by the sea.

The image to the right shows Split’s southern, sea-facing wall from along the recently revamped Riva, or promenade. I’ve highlighted the visible remnants of the original palace wall and, in the distance, the reconstructed medieval bell tower that marks the city center.

In the image to the left, a gentleman enjoys a smoke from the scant remnant of an original northern aperture. The northern and eastern walls remain more clean-shaven than their southern counterpart, while the western wall is all but engulfed by the city’s early outgrowths.

The center image shows the city’s central outdoor space, the Peristyle, as people gather for early morning ceremonies. The belltower and cathedral stand just to the left and what were once Diocletian’s apartments lie beyond the prothyron straight ahead.[3] I've logged this entry from the image’s right side. The cafe that took over the ground floor of the Renaissance palace that took over the side of Diocletian's arcade just happened to have wireless access. Originally, the Peristyle gave access to the imperial apartments, the mausoleum, and the temples. It also brought order to the complex relationship of varied levels and provided a transmissive link between north and south.

In its coordinating role, the Peristyle acts as an urban manifold. Like Grand Central Terminal, it appears as an elegantly articulated void placed upon a carefully coordinated, sectionally significant groundplane. As in other examples, we see here the primacy of the floorplane and the spatial utility of the screen. The space feels regular and symmetrical without actually being so. The steps, flanking arcades, grand façade smoothly synthesize the various ground levels. The space is an odd, uncanny inversion of interior and exterior, akin to the intimate enclosure of Barcelona’s Plaça Reial but reserving the hierarchical disposition of Paris’ Place des Vosges. The central ceremonial space serves as a cognitive constant to coordinate and relate the surrounding site’s varied spatial experiences.

Split supports special scrutiny for several reasons. First, compared to Venice’s impacted opacity or Tokyo’s hyper-commercialized cacophony, Split’s chronological coherence seems sufficiently digestible as to occasionally appear downright diagrammatic.[4] Second, Split walks an absurd line between domestic design and city planning.[5] The “urban design” I am pursuing with this fellowship falls somewhere between these two extremes.

Simultaneously, Split also renders an effective critique of such a golden mean. Like many of the urban phenomena I have observed thus far, Split’s contemporary democratic appeal actually originates in an initial authoritarian imposition. In this case, a town was founded to sustain and worship a single man. The relationship between shared space and its political underwriting is not always a comfortable one. Finally, the city is sobering in its operative obsolescence. Dwarfed by the metropolis it figureheads, the palace now reserves only symbolic and touristic roles within the larger urban milieu.[6] Even at the core, the old city’s busiest sectors are relegated outside its walls--a market to the east, a promenade to the south, and pedestrian arteries to the west. Most of the palace’s open space has been rationed to café’s and bars—not necessarily a negative, but requiring commitment to a chair and some Kuna (Croatia’s national currency) for inhabitation.

[1] The tetrarchy established two Emperors who would in their own lifetime withdraw from the throne to be replaced by two vice-emperors. Diocletian re-located to Split in 305 AD after abdicating from the throne in Nicomedia, from where he had continued to rule the eastern part of the empire after its division.

[2] St. Dominius was martyred under Diocletian’s Christian persecution. Hence, Split’s cathedral registers the paradigmatic power shift from persecutor to persecuted at the close of the Roman Empire.

[3] The prothyron’s entablature rises above an arch between central columns. In antique architecture a prothyrum marked the transition from the outside to the inner door of a house.

[4] It is also well documented, having been drawn and measured by notable architects and authors since Palladio. These include Fischer von Erlach in the 18th century, Robert Adam and Charles Clerisseau in 1757, C.F. Cassas in 1780 (published in a 1802 book by J. Lavallee), Georg Niemann in 1910, Ernst Hebrard and Jacques Zeiller 1912, Msgr. Frane Bulic and Ljubo Karaman in 1927, and Cvito Fiskovic and Tomislav Marasovic in recent decades.

[5] In terms of urban development, Split’s disposition invites comparison with other towns of Roman origin such as Florence. The initial logic is similar—the castrum plan with cardo and decumanus—but Split is smaller and, with the palace’s exterior walls left extant, more hermetic. Florence’s division of political and religious centers is inverted in Split. While Florence’s cathedral was established outside the original Roman settlement and the Palazzo Vecchio built within it, Split reused the Roman religious center (originally also the political center) and then developed its own political center outside, to the west.

[6] In Recombinant Urbanism, David Graham Shane charges that, “European cities have intervened to recondition and rehabilitate their central squares as new public life-worlds, living rooms where individuals can be made comfortable. Previously, individuals had been merged into the mass for formal political demonstrations or protest rallies, military or state-controlled parades in the Cine Citta; now they are herded together to enjoy the spectacular repackaging of their cultural heritage as historically themed places where they can (ultimately) spend money.” (Shane 194)

*composited structural plan and developmental sequence images scanned from J. Marasović's Diocletian's Palace and photographed from on-site signage