Croatia Diaries: Postcards from the Palace

Three nights of social climbing in coastal Split

I think, deep down, I’ve always known I’d one day sleep in a palace. I think I’ve just got what it takes, you know? What surprises me though is just how early in my career I’ve managed it. I’ve published no novels, won no prizes, have spoken at no events. And yet here I am laid in bed in a palace in Split, a city on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast.

Unfortunately, lots of other people lie in beds in palaces in Split, every night. It’s almost harder not to lie in a bed in a palace. Unlike many towns and cities on this particular coastline Split doesn’t have some boring, dime-a-dozen old town, instead it has a palace.

The palace belonged to Diocletian originally, a Roman emperor who had it built as his retirement home in the fourth century. What’s left still standing makes up the perimeter of the very centre of town. Modern buildings have popped up inside and sit alongside ancient Roman walls.

My bed is in the Golden Gate Dream Rooms, an establishment with a name that’s accurate in part: it is literally in the city’s Golden Gate. We often leave our room through a door at the bottom and are greeted with a full tour group marvelling at where we live. But it is not a Dream Room, instead a poky little apartment with sex art on the walls, that is, art that depicts sex, at least in a quite abstract, Picasso-esque sort of way.

---

Split’s oldest resident makes Diocletian’s mid-life crisis pad look like a thrown-up concrete new build. She’s right there on show in the Peristyle, the gleaming large central courtyard from which the cathedral and bell tower can be accessed. She, in this case, is a 3500-year-old Egyptian Sphinx, who sits crouched on a wall with no guardrail or security.

She’s actually one of three, though one has seen better days (she’s headless) and the other sits in a museum. Not this one. She sits and surveys the riff raff and the hoi polloi who come to gawp at the columns and bell tower and ocean views and who generally don’t even notice her unless she’s pointed out.

---

The bell tower, you cannot miss. You can see it as you sail into Split harbour, if that’s your style, or if you prefer, as you walk along the promenade. When you’re inside the palace walls you lose it for a while and then all of a sudden, there it is, rearing up at you. It was built in the 12th century, though most of what you’re looking at is from 1908 when it was drastically remodelled.

Climbing it is a chore but worth the view. What is it with climbing bell towers that the modern traveller (or at least I) can’t seem to cope with? I can walk for hours, run for kilometres without stopping, hike to the top of a really big hill, but a bell tower is almost a step too high.

I huff and puff and wheeze and my pulse pounds in my ears and then finally, mercifully, I have no more stairs to climb and I am at the top. I nearly succumbed to get here but here I am, staring out at the rest of Split.

There’s the Mediterranean, a perfect blue, and the sky above. There’s the old parts of town right below, a lived-in, real old town, even in a palace, unlike Dubrovnik with its Disneyland-esque rabble of AirBnBs and hotels. Washing hangs from balconies and everywhere below there are lives being lived. Then there is the rest of Split, sprawling away into the distance. It’s the largest city on Croatia’s long coastline but most see only the very centre, the bits in the guidebook.

They leave this only to get boats from the harbour to Vis, Brac, Hvar.

---

There are many different kinds of boat available should you wish to leave Split by sea. There’s the superyachts lined up side-by-side in the marina, oligarchs and oil barons (probably) perched aboard. There are the slightly more normal yachts, the ferries and the cruise ships.

I look at all of these as we walk along the promenade. It’s lined with palm trees and studded, every few steps, with plaques marking medallists from past Olympics. Most are from the time when Croatia made up part of the larger Yugoslavia, but the plaques remain, much in the same way that should one day Scotland finally vote for independence, English people will remain clingingly attached to Andy Murray and his triumps.

In the evening the Croatians conduct their own passeggiata, strolling along the water in their finest. It’s a wonder any of them can do this without holding their nose. The harbour may be pretty but it stinks. Get close to the water and you get a nose-ful of sulphur. This is thanks to the old scamp Diocletian again who, naturally, needed a spa as part of his retirement home. The fresh water brought down from the hills through aqueducts gives the harbour this distinct, slightly rotten smell.

---

We retreat back inside the walls. There’s plenty to see. There’s the cellars, a filming location for Game of Thrones, like most of Croatia. It’s easier to list the places where HBO’s tentacles didn’t reach than did, though Split got off lightly.

There’s the Silver Gate, which is mostly still standing, on the eastern side of the old palace. And the vestibule, an open air rotunda a la the Pantheon in Rome, a building feature fit for summer on the Mediterranean. Only in sunny places like Split can a huge room with a hole in the roof have once been a corridor into an emperor’s apartment.

But the best place in the city, the one I always gravitate back towards, is the Peristyle. The columns of the courtyard shoot upwards and on the steps around the central floor a particularly entrepreneurial bar owner has placed cushions for patrons to sit and drink.

I sit and watch the crowds go by on my last night sleeping in a palace. I could get used to it. I think I’ll build one for myself, when I retire.

---

Some housekeeping.

If you’d like to discover more newsletters like mine, you can subscribe to The Sample, which curates the best newsletters and sends you those worth subscribing to. You can subscribe through this link. Doing so helps this blog get more readers so please do check it out.