Split, Croatia

We packed up and hit the road for Split today. Three hours drive turned into more like 4+ as we took the inland route and hit road works. But who knows what we might have encountered on the seaside route. Better to just enjoy the journey.

One whole area of the country near the Bosnian border seemed very empty; no farming, empty houses, few towns. We wondered if folks had moved away during the war or if it was just not a good place to make a living (farming would have to be what you did).

Split is a big town and the streets are not so well marked and are hard to pronounce. In the end, we used the GPS to home in on the hotel. Feet up relaxing until it cools down. This place is hot and the beach is full of people.

Today is Diocletian's Palace day. He was the Roman Emperor from 244 to 311 AD. He was the only emperor to abdicate so in AD 305 he came to the palace he had built in Split.

Over the years, much of the upper floors of the palace crumbled or were cannibalized for other dwellings. By our times, little was left of the above ground structures. However, the palace had a huge set of basements for functional usage and these got filled in with trash over those same years until they were solid rubble and long forgotten. They were rediscovered in the 1950's and excavated. Given the nature of construction then, the basement wall layouts were a duplicate of the ones that used to sit above them thus providing a good idea of how the palace once looked.

It took a good while to see all the basement areas which included dodging large tour groups. We got pretty good at this and often had entire rooms to ourselves. The cellars include artifacts from later times including a very large medieval olive press. Sections of the piping that supplied water were visible in several rooms -- rectangular blocks with round holes through them. It is unclear if the blocks were formed like concrete or bored out for the pipe holes.

In Diocletian's vestibule, a large conical stone structure, we found a group of Klapa singers. This is a group of six men performing traditional Croatian songs accapella.The surrounding stone and the shape of the vestibule combine to provide a perfect setting to showcase their vocal talents. Listen to them on a video of their performance I made.

This place gets hot and despite intermittent sea breezes, the afternoon is best devoted to sedentary pursuits. In our case, it was pots of tea in the hotel garden within the reaching tentacles of hotel WiFi. We found the hotel's half board arrangement at 15 Euros to be a good deal. The Hotel Park has a top notch chef. Alas, a cold course, a hot course, a large main course and dessert proved to be too much and portions of the tiramisu and cheesecake had to be abandoned.