[Croatia] A two-faced city

If you’ve only heard of Croatia..
Croatia was amazing. Split is the city I went to (and unfortunately the only one), and it blew me away, literally, from the modern Split with fancy West European-style cafes along the beach, back to the sour history of Croatia when Muslims, Jews, and Christians all lived together under Roman rule, which is well represented by one of the best preserved ruins of the Roman Empire. Amongst cities I’ve been in, Split is a city with, I think, most faces. It’s hard to explain without first mentioning the Diocletian’s Palace, so here it is.

Diocletian’s Palace
The most famous site in the city is Diocletian's Palace. Emperor Diocletian was famous for his cruelty to Christians, and was responsible for Rome's most brutal and bloody purges. He built this Palace for himself, which housed himself and 9,000 other Romans when they first settled in Croatia. Its also known to be the most complete remains of the Roman palaces. I actually got to enter the basement and see some parts of the palace that hasn’t been touched since it was first built, and even I thought that it was well built despite complex designing. Here are several pictures, where first is when it was first built, and the rest are ones I took of the palace today.

So as you can see, since its abandonment by the Romans it has transformed significantly over the years. Markets run in its basement, restaurants serve out of its walls, and shops sell goods even in the narrowest ally. Each ally and corner brings a different age. One moment you’re inside the Temple of Jupiter at the center of the Palace, in the store next to it you’re picking out which gelato flavor you want, and in the room next door you’re inside one of the first synagogues in Europe. It amazing how much the city has been preserved and reformed simultaneously. Though seeing Louis Vitton and Sushi restaurants inside the exact same room where Roman soldiers and villagers used to live in did not put a smile on my face, I did find it astonishing that the city made it happen.

The Local Split
Split is a city built around the palace, and because that’s where the history and culture of the city stems from, for once I’m not going to complain about the tourists concentrating in a single area. But I still do think there are great parts of Split even outside the Diocletian’s Palace.

The Green market is located just outside the palace on the east side, where mothers and wives gather and decide on what to buy for the day’s meal. Arriving at Split at 7am, this is the first place I walked through, and even at that time the market was filled with people (obviously nearly all females). In the background you see the old palace wall from the outside, and again, it’s interesting to see one of the most significant ruins from the BC era, and mothers of today doing their routine shopping right besides each other. The market sells not only fresh food, but meat, flowers, souveneuirs, clothes, you name it.

The neighborhood
If you walk 10-15 minutes from the city center where the palace is located, you escape the tourist crowd and enter more of a local neighborhood. Here, there aren’t fancy cafes that are overpriced, English signs or menus, cheap hostels or luxurious hotels. Instead there are old houses, narrow streets, kids going to school, businessmen reading the paper at cafes, and

unknown supermarkets (well, that is, until Croatia becomes part of the EU. Something causing headaches to locals). Because it was still only 8am and I had time until the palace and the museum opens (10am), I found a nice café far from the city center and had coffee there. The lady working there was nice and let me use the internet.

Maryen
The palace is positioned in the center of Split, to the south is the beach, and to the east is the Green Market and residential areas. So, what’s on the west? Honestly, nothing much. Just tall mountains that are too big for tourists to climb.

So I climbed it. Its the mountain you see in the picture above. It must be the part of me that doesn’t want to do what other tourists does, and wants to do what other tourists don’t. I’m also willing to take risks and take hours to do something where nothing in future return is foreseeable. So where some people see the mountain unattractive because they don’t know what it is and what it offers, others find it thrilling. So what was thereon top of this mountain? I’ll let the photos tell (though it won’t reflect the feeling of accomplishment).

Oh and I forgot to mention, I met this guy named Stypen in the palace museum, who came with me to climb the mountain.

The people of Croatia
Though I wasn’t able to sit down and talk to many of them (because I was constantly walking around and climbing mountains), I did feel something when talking to Stypen and several others. They all seem unsatisfied with something. They all had their own worries and concerns. The fact that they have concerns is not anything abnormal, but I thought that the Croatian people tend to bring that up in almost every conversation topic. Talking to Stepi (Stypen’s nickname), most of what we talked about were his problems, from his family issues, his knee injury, Croatia’s EU

membership, his addiction to cigs, and even about the mortgage policy in Croatia. Being Japanese and not being able to tell him to shut up (cus that's rude, right?), his stories went on forever and ever..which wouldn’t have been as bad if half of what he said wasn’t in Croatian and we were able to have an actual debate.

Viva Croatia.