Croatia · Old Town
Dubrovnik
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Dubrovnik is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Knežev dvor 1,500 points
This one hands its ground floor to the lane. The arcade is open and you walk straight through it. Stop underneath and look up: no two of the capitals over your head are the same.
Crkva sv. Blagovještenja 500 points
On Od Puča, one lane south of the main run. The front is modest enough that you can walk the street twice and not notice it. Slow down at the door. What is behind it does not match what is in front of it.
Crkva sv. Ignacija 500 points
The quietest corner of the town, up at the top of the south side, and the last thing most people reach. You come up out of breath, and then the whole day you have walked is lying under you. Save this bite for later.
Sv. Franjo 500 points
It sits at the far west end of the main street, and almost everybody walks past its long flank on the way in without turning. Turn. The way in is a narrow door on the side, and the quiet behind it is worth the detour.
Bokar 250 points
It sits out over the water at the western point, on its own piece of rock, with sea under three sides of it. Across the little bay, Lovrijenac looks back from its cliff. The two of them have been doing that for a very long time and neither has blinked.
Minčeta 250 points
The high point of the entire ring, up in the north west corner. From here everything else in the town is under you, and on the far side there is nothing but sea. It is a proper climb. I have never once regretted a climb.
Revelin 250 points
You have to leave the ring for this one: over the bridge at the east end and out. Which is exactly why it is quiet up there. The terrace looks back at the town, and nothing else on this route does that.
Sv. Ivan 250 points
Low, thick and standing in the water at the head of the quay. There is an aquarium in the base of it now and a maritime museum upstairs. A building that spent centuries looking at the sea and keeps a little of it in tanks.
Name origin
Why it is called Dubrovnik.
Two names, one town. Ragusa is the medieval Latin one, and Italian still uses it. Dubrovnik is the Slavic one, and it comes out of the woods: dubrava, a wood of oaks. So a city built entirely of quarried stone is named after trees. There is not one left inside the walls. I counted.
Sources: jezik.hr, hjp.znanje.hr, www.enciklopedija.hr
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
The Old Town is a rock, and behind the rock there was water. Look at the main street: dead straight, dead flat, and the only thing here that is either. It is flat because it used to be sea. The shallow strip between the rock and the mainland was filled in, and the filling is the street you are standing on. Everything else climbs, up towards Srđ. That is why so much of this level is steps.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr, zod.hr
Why then
When the first stone went down.
The story everybody tells goes like this: in the seventh century people came up the coast from Epidaurum, and the town starts with them. The ground disagrees. At what is now the town harbour the oldest traces of habitation are Hellenistic, and Roman gravestones and Hellenistic, Illyrian, Roman and Byzantine coins have all come up out of this ground. A founding date is really a moving-in date. Somebody was always here first. Usually me.
Sources: zod.hr, www.enciklopedija.hr
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 500–1100
Byzantium, from a very long way off. For something like six centuries the town grew under Byzantine protection, on a Romance and Slavic footing, which in practice meant an emperor far away and a free hand close up. The free hand went into treaties, one after another: Molfetta, Pisa, Ravenna, Ancona, Bosnia. That is an arrangement I could live with.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr
- 1205–1358
Venice. From 1205 the town recognised Venetian overlordship, and Venice made use of it: it picked the rector and the archbishop, installed both, and tried to run the trade and the shipping as well. So the man living in the palace on your route was chosen somewhere else. It ended in 1358, when the peace of Zadar pushed Venice off this entire coast.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr, zod.hr
- 1358–1808
Itself, formally under the crown of Croatia and Hungary. The treaty of Višegrad of 27 May 1358 put the town under that king and it kept everything else: territory reaching fifty kilometres north and south, its own coinage, seal, flag, courts, laws and embassies. It called itself Respublica Ragusina. It founded more than twenty consulates in the fifteenth century and had more than eighty consuls abroad by the eighteenth. All of it decided inside a walled town you can cross in ten minutes.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr, zod.hr
- 1808–1918
France, then Austria. In 1808 Marshal Marmont dissolved the republic and attached the town to the Illyrian Provinces. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the area went to the Habsburg Monarchy, which liked the position enough to keep the place on the books as a fortified town until 1886, and to go on extending the system. So these walls were still on duty a decade after somebody invented the telephone.
Sources: zod.hr, www.enciklopedija.hr
- 1918–
Yugoslavia, then Croatia. The twentieth century put the town inside Yugoslavia, since 1991 it has been in the Republic of Croatia, and today it is the administrative seat of its county. In 1979 the Old Town was put forward for the UNESCO world heritage list. That is the first time in this whole long queue of owners that somebody wrote down that the lanes themselves were the point.
Sources: zod.hr
The emblem
What the shield means.
The real arms are a shield shaped like an upside down pear, with eight bars across it, red and silver in turn, the first red and the last silver. Eight bars is about six more than a glyph this size can carry. From any distance it would be a smudge. So the icon is a round tower off the city wall instead. Sixteen of them sit in the ring you are walking, and in places the wall behind them stands twenty five metres out of the rock. That one reads from across a room.
Sources: www.dubrovnik.hr, citywallsdubrovnik.hr
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
These lanes are exactly as wide as somebody decided they should be. The city statute of 1272 set precise rules for planned development: prescribed street widths, where housing and public space could go, stone instead of timber, paved lanes and squares, and houses made to fit regular blocks. After the great fire of 1296 a further provision governed building across more than two thirds of the town. You are walking around inside a legal document.
Sources: zod.hr
A rock by the sea has no fresh water of its own. So the town went and fetched some. Between 1436 and 1437 a conduit brought water in from the springs at Šumet, almost twelve kilometres off, and the whole job took sixteen months. Most of it lies idle now, but its line still shows in the shape of the districts outside the walls.
Sources: zod.hr
One thousand nine hundred and forty metres of stone, once around. That is the edge of this level, and you can see it from nearly every lane inside it. The ring took its present shape in the thirteenth century, picked up a renaissance skin in front of it in the fifteenth, and its fortresses were finished in the seventeenth. Nothing was added after that, because there was nowhere left to put it.
Sources: zod.hr
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- Od
- Of, or from. The street is named for what stands on it or where it takes you: Od Puča for the wells, Od Rupa for the grain pits, and then Od Domina, Od Kaštela, Od Sigurate, Od Margarite, Od Sorte and Od Pustijerne. Eight signposts pretending to be street names.
- Za
- Behind. Za Rokom runs behind St Roch, Za Karmenom behind the Carmelite house, Za Rupama behind the pits. A town small enough that behind is address enough.
- Ispod
- Below, and it brings its whole family: Ispod Minčete, Ispod Mira, Iza Grada, Između Polača, Pred Dvorom, Uz Jezuite, Na Andriji. These are not names, they are directions. And the mir in Ispod Mira is a wall, not peace.
- poljana
- An open square, though the word starts out meaning a field. Bunićeva poljana, Gundulićeva poljana, Poljana Marina Držića, Poljana Ruđera Boškovića. The flat spots in a town that otherwise goes upstairs.
- -eva
- The ending just means his. Boškovićeva, Palmotićeva, Zlatarićeva, Đorđićeva, Gundulićeva: so-and-so's street, with the word for street usually dropped altogether. More than twenty lanes here are a surname and nothing else.
- Uska
- Narrow. There is an Uska and an Uska ulica, and both are telling the truth. There is also a Široka, which means broad, and it is not. All of them suit me fine.
- Zlatarska
- A trade instead of a person, and there are only a few: Zlatarska from the goldsmiths, Kovačka from the smiths, Zeljarica from the greens. Three lanes that say what was sold on them. One of those sounds like lunch.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 86streets
- 604dots
- 9.1km of street
- 11.3km on foot
- 3.2hours at a stroll
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.