Sponza Palace

At the eastern end of the Stradun, where Dubrovnik's main street opens into Luža Square, stands the Sponza Palace — a customs house that outlived the state it was built to serve. Raised between 1516 and 1522, it is one of the very few buildings in the Old Town to come through the catastrophic earthquake of 1667 essentially undamaged, which means the stonework in front of you is genuinely early 16th century rather than a post-disaster reconstruction like almost everything around it.

Gothic Below, Renaissance Above

The palace was designed by the Croatian builder Paskoje Miličević Mihov, with the loggia and the carved decoration executed by the Andrijić brothers and other stonecutters. The result is a deliberate mixture: a rectangular block arranged around an inner courtyard, with a ground-floor arcaded loggia and Gothic detailing set under Renaissance forms. It is one of the clearest surviving statements of how Dubrovnik built in the decades when its trade was at its height, and it survives in something very close to its original shape.

The name is more ambiguous. "Sponza" most likely comes from the Latin word "spongia", a reference to the spot where rainwater was collected before the building went up. Locals also called it Divona, from "dogana", meaning customs house. Both names point at what the place actually did for a living.

Customs House, Mint, Treasury, School

Sponza was built as a customs office and bonded warehouse, and goods entering the city were weighed and taxed under its arcades. Over the following centuries it absorbed most of the other functions a small maritime republic needed to keep in one place: it served as the mint, the armoury, the treasury, a bank and a school. Its atrium became the city's trading floor and business meeting place, and in the 16th century the building also housed a literary academy, the Academia dei Concordi, which made it the cultural centre of the Republic as well as its commercial one.

The Latin inscription still visible in the atrium spells out the ethic the customs officers were held to: our weights do not permit cheating, and when I measure goods, God measures with me. For a republic whose entire position rested on being trusted by foreign merchants, that was less a piety than a business model. The Republic of Ragusa ran as an independent maritime state from 1358, when the Treaty of Zadar ended Venetian rule over the city, until Napoleon's Marshal Marmont abolished it in 1808 — and for most of those four and a half centuries its money and its paperwork passed through this building.

The Building That Survived 1667

On the morning of 6 April 1667, at around eight o'clock, an earthquake estimated at magnitude 6.4 struck Dubrovnik. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people were killed, the rector Simone Ghetaldi among them, and more than three quarters of the city's public buildings were destroyed. The city walls, the Church of St Saviour and the Sponza Palace were among the handful of structures that came through it more or less intact — while at the Rector's Palace the chapel collapsed outright, burying the rector and a number of nobles.

That survival mattered practically as well as architecturally. With so much of the administration homeless, Sponza's intact rooms kept working while the city was rebuilt around them under new regulations that gave the Stradun — first paved in limestone in 1468 and running some 300 metres from the Pile Gate to the Ploče Gate — the uniform frontages it still shows today.

The palace now houses the State Archives in Dubrovnik, moved here from the Rector's Palace and reckoned one of the richest collections of its kind in Europe. The oldest document in it is a papal bull of Benedict VIII addressed to Vitalis, the archbishop of Dubrovnik, dated 1022. The holdings run to just over 400 fonds and collections occupying more than eight kilometres of shelving, and the core records of the Republic alone amount to over 7,000 bound volumes and more than 100,000 separate documents. The Archives of the Republic of Dubrovnik, covering 1022 to 1808, are inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register.

Part of the building is given over to the Memorial Room of the Defenders of Dubrovnik, which commemorates the siege of 1991–92. It holds portraits of the roughly 300 defenders and civilians killed, along with documents, maps and film of the shelling, and the shredded Croatian flag that flew over Mount Srđ. The room was fully reconstructed and reopened in recent years.

The Square Outside

Sponza's atrium and the square in front of it are still in active use. The Dubrovnik Summer Festival, held every year since 1950 between 10 July and 25 August, opens with its ceremony on Luža Square directly outside the palace, and the atrium serves as one of the festival's venues. The same square carries Orlando's Column, put up in 1418 by Bonino di Milano and Antun Dubrovčanin, the 31-metre city bell tower first built in 1444, and the Church of St Blaise, dedicated to the city's patron saint. The stretch of Stradun running past the palace was used for the "walk of atonement" filmed for the fifth season of Game of Thrones, with some 500 extras. The courtyard has had a stranger afterlife still: a digital model of it is one of the standard test scenes used by computer graphics researchers working on lighting.

Entry to the archives and the memorial room is straightforward, the building sits a few minutes' walk from the old harbour, and there is enough here for half an hour rather than half a day — which makes the Sponza an easy first or last stop on foot before or after a Dubrovnik gulet cruise.