Diocletian's Palace

Diocletian's Palace is the historic core of Split, built between 295 and 305 AD as the retirement residence of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Despite its name, it was built more like a fortified military camp than a villa — a roughly rectangular complex about 215 by 180 metres, with corner towers, and walls that on the southern side once rose directly from the sea.

A Fortified Compound by the Adriatic

The ground plan is an irregular rectangle: the eastern wall runs about 215 metres, the northern about 175 and the southern about 182. Sixteen towers punctuated the three landward facades, along with square corner towers and a mixture of octagonal and rectangular gate towers, while the southern facade facing the water needed none at all. The site was chosen for convenience as much as for its view, lying a short distance from Salona, then the capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia and one of the largest cities of the late empire.

The palace was built mainly from white limestone quarried on the island of Brač, with bricks produced locally in Spalatum (Roman Split) and decorative marble and granite brought in from Egypt, Italy, and Greece. Four gates gave access to the complex: the Golden Gate to the north, facing the road to Salona; the Silver Gate to the east; the Iron Gate to the west; and the Bronze Gate to the south, opening directly onto the sea. Among the imported decoration were twelve Egyptian sphinxes, of which only three survive; the one still standing on the Peristyle dates to the 15th century BC and the reign of the pharaoh Thutmose III, making it more than a thousand years older than the palace it now ornaments.

Inside the Walls

The interior follows standard Roman planning. Two main streets, the cardo and the decumanus, cross at right angles; the decumanus separates the northern half, given over to servants, soldiers and storage, from the southern half reserved for the emperor. Walking south from the Golden Gate along the cardo brings you to the Peristyle, the monumental colonnaded court that formed the ceremonial approach to the imperial apartments, and then into the Vestibule, rectangular outside but circular within, once crowned by a dome covered in glittering mosaic.

On one side of the Peristyle stood Diocletian's octagonal mausoleum, originally ringed by a covered colonnade of twenty-four marble columns with Corinthian capitals. Facing it across the court was the Temple of Jupiter, raised alongside the rest of the complex and converted in the sixth century into the Baptistery of St John. Beneath the southern half of the palace run the substructures, some sixty vaulted halls whose original purpose was simply to lift the imperial apartments to a level above the sloping ground; because they lay filled with debris and forgotten for centuries, they are today among the best-preserved ancient complexes of their kind anywhere in the world.

The Emperor Who Walked Away

Diocletian, who became emperor in 284 AD, is remembered as the first Roman emperor to voluntarily abdicate the throne, retiring to this palace in 305 AD. He died here on 3 December, in either 311 or 312 AD depending on the source. His reign had reorganised the empire through the Tetrarchy, a system of rule by four, and his retirement was meant to demonstrate that the arrangement could survive a peaceful handover of power. A much-repeated ancient anecdote has the old emperor turning down an appeal to return to politics on the grounds that his correspondents would not press the point if they could see the cabbages he had grown with his own hands. The Tetrarchy collapsed regardless, pulled apart by the ambitions of his successors, and Diocletian spent his last years watching it happen from Dalmatia.

From Imperial Retreat to Living City

The palace became a town by accident. When the Avars and Slavs sacked Salona in the seventh century, its refugees moved a few kilometres down the coast and took shelter behind the walls of the by then three-hundred-year-old palace, subdividing its halls into houses and adapting its monuments to Christian use. The palace's central square, the Peristyle, together with the former mausoleum — now the Cathedral of St Domnius — survive largely intact, and the complex was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979. The cathedral is generally described as the oldest Catholic cathedral still in use in its original structure; its 57-metre Romanesque and Gothic bell tower was begun in the mid-13th century, completed around the 16th and substantially rebuilt in 1908, while its walnut doors, carved by the Split artist Andrija Buvina in 1214, show twenty-eight scenes from the life of Christ.

Rediscovery and the Palace Today

The palace shaped European architecture a second time in the 18th century. In 1757 the Scottish architect Robert Adam spent five weeks in Spalatro with the French draughtsman Charles-Louis Clérisseau, measuring and drawing the ruins, and published the results in 1764 as Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia, illustrated with sixty-one engraved plates. Unlike the temples and forums his contemporaries were recording, this was a residence, and the lessons Adam drew from it fed directly into the neoclassical Adam style in Britain and, through it, into architecture across Europe and North America. Today the palace is not a museum piece behind glass but a living part of the city: roughly 3,000 people still live within its walls, alongside shops, cafés, and restaurants built into the ancient stonework, and many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter from Split.