This place is awash with history, flooded, in fact

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A few years ago, I decided to switch up where I would live in Croatia for the sake of change and comparison, and I ended up spending a year down in Dubrovnik at the very bottom of the Croatian coast. While I was living there, I was sharing these short vignettes from the city with the readers of this Substack. The intention was to randomly highlight certain things that I would come across or experience while there, and without going into any ‘intellectualizing’. The point was to keep it short and light. I am going to start to do the same with the city I resided in prior to Dubrovnik, the same one that I call home now: Split.

For those interested in the Dubrovnik vignettes, click on the Travelogue section at the top of this page and scroll down. Here’s one that focused on foreign writers who spent time in the city, writers like George Bernard Shaw, Rebecca West, and Lord Byron.

Travelogue

Dubrovnik Vignettes: Writers on Ragusa

Niccolo Soldo

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May 28, 2021

Shortly after the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes became a dictatorship in 1929 under King Aleksandar I and renamed itself Yugoslavia, a PR campaign was launched to win back some public favour in the west. Various writers, thinkers, leading figures of business, politics, and other fields were given grand tours of the Kingdom in order to promo…

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There are so many reasons to love living in Split; the climate, the scenery, the pace of life, the lifestyle, the food, the safety, and much, much more. As a historical obsessive, one of my favourite things about living here is that you cannot avoid running into history wherever you find yourself in Split. If you take a 7 minute walk from the boardwalk (Riva) that is located at the southern end of Emperor Diocletian’s Palace and head directly north, in those 7 minutes you will begin with ruins (tiny, admittedly) from Ancient Greece, through Ancient Rome, and the Medieval era, quickly finding yourself among the Renaissance era palaces of local nobility, and then through the Baroque phase under the Venetians, the public works of the very brief Napoleonic regime, the late Habsburg building boom, and finally through to the realist brutalism of the communist era and whatever you want to call what we build these days. All in 7 minutes. I’m not kidding.

It’s a straight line of 700 metres, but you’ll naturally meander about it. You will pass through roughly 2,200 years of history courtesy of the architecture and public works that you see.

In fact, there’s so much history here that it becomes too difficult to highlight it all, meaning that some sites are given precedence for obvious reasons (cultural value, location, and tourist dollars). Many other sites are found across the city in areas that were only until recently undeveloped. The pre-Romanesque Church of the Holy Trinity is one such site.

The church is located in a small field tucked away from the main roads, rendering it invisble to all except those who already know where it is. Up until the 1950s, this was countryside. In the 1960s, the area around it began to be developed, mainly to service the shipyards to the northeast and the naval military base to its north. In 1979, a new stadium was built to serve as the main venue for the Mediterranean Games of that same year.

Archaeologists date the building of the church to between the 8th and 11th centuries AD, with consensus being some time in the 9th century. That makes this a pre-schism church (meaning before the Christian world split betweeen the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic).

Yes, it’s tiny. But they still hold Mass there every Sunday at 8:30am, except from the middle of June to the beginning of September, as it’s simply too hot to stand and not except at least one or two people to faint from the heat.

The church fell into disrepair long, long ago, but thanks to the efforts of a private group 100 years ago, followed up by the Franciscans from the nearby monastery around 60 years ago, renovation work was concluded to maintain its original form. Quite a lot of churches in Europe are built on the sites of older churches, with the new builds built in a completey new style. The great thing about the Church of the Holy Trinity is that its pre-Romanesque style has remained the same since it first appeared on the peninsula.

In this old photo (dated to the beginning of the 20th century) below, you can see how the cupola had caved in:

The first mention of this church was courtesy of Benedictine monks who had visited it in 1060 AD.

Pre-reconstruction and post-reconstruction:

Quite a lot of Romanesque ceramics were found on the site, and they were moved to the nearby archaeological museum for safekeeping.

I’ve got tons of material to work with here, and not all of it will be confessional (even though I will do another entry on the spectacular Sephardic cemetery that has the best view of the city). As mentioned, I will keep these vignettes short, light, and cozy.

You gotta have a garden with vines nearby. This is the Med after all 🙂

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