Croatia · Old Town
Split
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Split 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.
katedrala svetog Duje 1,500 points
It sits on the Peristil, the sunken square that four lanes run into and stop. Look at the wooden doors before you go in, panel by panel: the man who carved them has a street of his own two minutes away. Then climb the tower. Narrow steps, worn treads, my favourite texture.
Palača Milesi 500 points
Cross to the far side and look back. This one wants distance; up close you get nothing but wall. Then sit down. The best sitting in the level is right here, which I mention as a thing that has never once sat down.
Zlatna vrata 500 points
Go through this one rather than up to it. Then look up. There is a chapel wedged into the wall above the passage, so narrow that two of you could not stand abreast in there. A doorway with a room in its ceiling. I like a building that fits in a gap.
Crkva i samostan Sv. Frane 250 points
The far west end of the waterfront, where the paving runs out and the noise stops with it. Step in off the lane: there is a rectangle of shade in there that nobody on the promenade knows about. I do my best eating where nobody is watching.
Pazar 250 points
The one place in here that sells things I would eat. Buy something you can hold in one hand, then keep walking while you eat it. Streets are for eating. I have been saying so for six hundred years.
Ribarnica 250 points
Get here early. By the middle of the afternoon there is nothing left but wet marble and a hose. Before nine it is the loudest room in the level, and everything in it was in the water yesterday. I would not eat any of it. I still turn up.
Name origin
Why it is called Split.
The name got here first. Six hundred years before the palace, Greeks called this place Aspalathos, after a thorny shrub that yields a scented oil. Latin wore that down to Spalatum, and a Roman road map is already writing Spalato in the fourth century. So the city is named after a bush that scratches, and not after the famous house at all. That suits me. I am also low, hard and in the way.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr, split.hr, www.perseus.tufts.edu
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Nobody picked this for a town. An emperor picked it to stop working in, on the coast he came from, and everyone else moved in afterwards. Look at what he took: a peninsula closing off a bay, the hill called Marjan at the end of it, and behind the town a wall of mountains, Mosor at 1339 metres and Kozjak at 780, with exactly one notch in it. The notch is the Klis pass, 360 metres up, and until a railway turned up in the 1870s everything arriving from inland came down through it. One way in, for everybody, for fifteen hundred years. That is not a road, that is a queue.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr, split.hr
Why then
When the first stone went down.
It depends what you are counting. A Greek settlement stood near here between the fourth and the third century BC. The palace went up between 295 and 305. But Split as a town starts in the seventh century, when the Romance population gradually left Salona and Aspalathos and found shelter inside the palace walls. That is the whole trick of this place. It is not a town that built itself a house. It is a house that filled up with a town.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr, split.hr
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 295–1105
Rome, and then Byzantium from a distance. The palace was raised between 295 and 305 and stayed state property for four hundred years, occupied by imperial clerks and workers in the cloth manufactories. Then the people of Salona moved in and the property quietly turned into a town. As a Romance town it belonged to Byzantine Dalmatia, with a Frankish spell from 803 to 812 and then Byzantine again. I lay under all of it and the arrangement never once came up in conversation.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr
- 1105–1420
The Hungarian-Croatian kings on paper, the town itself in practice. From 1105 Split mostly recognised their sovereignty and otherwise ran its own affairs on old municipal rights. It kept a council, wrote its first proper book of law in 1312, and fetched its mayors in from Italy so the place would be run the way the better organised Italian towns were: Garganus from Ancona, then Perceval from Fermo. Venice held the town from 1327 to 1357 in the middle of all that. The council carried on meeting either way.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr, split.hr
- 1420–1797
Venice, for 377 years without a break. The council stayed and the top of it went: the count in charge had to be born in Venice. What the republic did give the town was work. On the proposal of a Split merchant it built a quarantine station and a customs house between 1581 and 1592, caravans came down over the pass with goods from the Balkans and further east, and everything was aired out here and reloaded onto ships. The merchant was Daniel Rodriga, and a lane in this level still carries his name.
Sources: split.hr, www.enciklopedija.hr
- 1797–1918
Austria, with the French in the middle of it. The Peace of Campo Formio gave the town to Austria in 1797, and the Peace of Pressburg handed it to France in 1805. In eight years the French administration threw out the medieval statute, abolished the ranks the town had sorted its people into, and pulled down part of the walls to widen and tidy the streets. Then the Congress of Vienna gave it back to Austria. Eight years is not long. For a street plan it is plenty.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr, split.hr
- 1918–
Yugoslavia, then Croatia. On 2 November 1918 a provincial government for Dalmatia was set up here and Zadar stopped being the province's head office; from 1 December the town belonged to the new Yugoslav kingdom. Since 1992 it has been the seat of the Split-Dalmatia county. That is five answers on this page to the question of who runs this place. The town has not moved once, and neither have I.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr
The emblem
What the shield means.
Most towns put an animal on a shield. Split put a building on a rectangle. Its arms are the north front of the palace, stylised, with the cathedral's bell tower rising out of it, a small Croatian shield in one upper corner, the city's patron in the other, and the whole thing boxed in gothic squares. That is four ideas fighting over one square inch. The city hit the problem before I did: on its own flag only the tower is left, white on blue, standing over the old core. So that is what you get here as well.
Sources: split.hr, hr.wikipedia.org
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
This is a monument nobody ever stopped living in, and that is the whole reason it is still here. Because life carried on inside the palace for more than seventeen hundred years, it is now one of the best preserved Roman palaces anywhere, and every building layer from antiquity to today came through with it. The historic core went onto the UNESCO world heritage list in 1979, together with the palace, ahead of Rome and ahead of Venice. Nothing in here was ever put behind glass.
Sources: split.hr, www.enciklopedija.hr
This level is two towns stitched together. The first was only the palace: four walls, a rectangle, nothing outside. Trade brought people, and by the eleventh century a suburb had grown against the west wall with a drystone wall of its own around it. In the thirteenth century a proper wall went round that suburb and joined the two, and the seam is still readable on the map. The palace's west gate became the front door of the whole thing, and above it the Roman goddess of victory was chiselled away and a cross cut into her place. They did not pull the gate down. They edited it.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr
Between 1860 and 1880 the mayor here was Ante Bajamonti. Under him the town got gas light in 1860, the long-disused Roman aqueduct was working again by 1880, the streets were tidied and widened, and the Prokurative was built. The same man opposed joining Dalmatia to Croatia and opposed making Croatian the official language. The other side won the council election in 1882 and Croatian went in. Then somebody handed out the street names, and both sides got some: Bajamontijeva, Trg Gaje Bulata, Morpurgova poljana, Klaićeva poljana. You can walk all four in an afternoon.
Sources: www.enciklopedija.hr, split.hr
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- ulica
- The plain word for a street, and Split hardly bothers with it. Ulica kralja Tomislava and Ulica bana Jelačića carry it. Inside the old walls most lanes are an adjective and nothing else: Bosanska, Zadarska, Trogirska. The noun is assumed.
- -ova
- Somebody's. Hang it on a surname and the street is finished: Papalićeva, Domaldova, Tvrtkova, Bajamontijeva, Medulićeva. A quarter of the names in this level are one person plus one ending.
- trg
- A square, the official kind. Narodni trg is the people's one, and there are Trg braće Radić, Trg Republike and Trg Gaje Bulata as well. Where it says trg, somebody planned it.
- poljana
- Also a square, but nobody planned it. Poljana means an open patch, a clearing. Carrarina poljana, Morpurgova poljana, Klaićeva poljana, Poljana kraljice Jelene. Small, quiet, and usually a surprise.
- širina
- A width. That is the entire name: a lane got wider here, and the wideness became the address. Grabovčeva širina and Mihovilova širina. The most honest street name I have ever eaten.
- kraj
- By, next to. Three streets in here are named after nothing but their neighbour: Kraj sv. Duje, Kraj sv. Ivana, Kraj sv. Marije. Next to a saint, and no further explanation offered.
- obala
- The shore. Obala hrvatskog narodnog preporoda is the long one along the water, and Trumbićeva obala carries on west when it runs out. Flat, wide, and the only place in this level where I see the whole sky at once.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 78streets
- 521dots
- 7.2km of street
- 9.3km on foot
- 2.6hours 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.