The bell tower
The palace grid entire, mountain to sea.
Sumitsurai — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Mattias Hill — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Samouraj — CC BY-SA 4.0 · FOTO:Fortepan — ID 100695: Adományozó/Donor: Dobóczi Zsolt. — CC BY-SA 3.0
Bishop of neighbouring Salona, executed by Diocletian in the great persecution of 304 — and when history turned, the Christians moved his relics into his killer's own mausoleum and cast the emperor out: no completer poetic justice stands in one building. His feast (7 May) is Split's greatest day still.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
St. Domnius is history's quiet revenge: the mausoleum of Diocletian — the Christians' fiercest persecutor — become his martyrs' cathedral: the emperor's body cast out and replaced by Domnius, whom he had personally executed, the domed Roman octagon working as church since the seventh century unbroken: the world's oldest cathedral building in use, uncontested. Inside are layers: Diocletian's and his wife's portrait frieze still circles the dome (staring eternally at their purpose's opposite) — the carved wooden doors (1214) with their twenty-eight Gospel scenes a Romanesque summit — and the slender bell tower (57m), Split's symbol, climbs its open stair to the greatest angle: the palace as complete grid below, between mountain and sea. Facing it, Jupiter's Temple turned baptistery: another sphinx, beheaded, at its door (the Christians decapitated the pagan) and its coffered vault the completest small Roman ceiling left. Tickets run in combos — and the tower before noon is kinder in stair and crowd.
The palace grid entire, mountain to sea.
The Gospel in twenty-eight wooden scenes.
The completest Roman ceiling, the beheaded sphinx.
Ul. Kraj Svetog Duje, 21000 Split