🇭🇷 Croatia · Northern Dalmatia
Split does not have a monument: Split IS the monument. Its old town is not organised around a Roman palace but INSIDE one. Seventeen hundred years ago, the emperor Diocletian had a palace-fortress built here to retire to; centuries later, refugees moved in among its walls and never left. The result is unique in the world: an inhabited Roman site, with bars, shops, hanging laundry, cats and residents who open their front door onto columns eighteen centuries old. It is not a museum behind a rope: it is a living neighbourhood.
At the heart of that maze is the Peristyle, the colonnaded square where Diocletian showed himself to his people; the vaulted cellars that held up his halls (which many now know from Game of Thrones); and the cathedral of St Duje, which was none other than the mausoleum of the emperor himself, the persecutor of the Christians, now turned into a Christian church: one of the greatest ironies in history. Around it, the city opens onto the Riva, the great seafront promenade of palms and cafés, and climbs towards the green hill of Marjan, the lungs and lookout of the people of Split.
This guide covers Split with a practical eye: how to make sense of the palace and what is ticketed and what is free, how to take the ferry to the islands, what to do in two or three days, where to eat fish and drink coffee like a local, and how to dodge the worst of the summer crush. Because Split, for all its history, is also a Mediterranean city best lived with your feet in the water and an ice cream in your hand.
Split was born of an imperial whim and a catastrophe. Around AD 305, the Roman emperor Diocletian — the only one to abdicate voluntarily and also the great persecutor of the Christians — had a colossal palace-fortress built beside his native Salona to retire to and tend his gardens. Three centuries later, when Salona was destroyed by Avars and Slavs (7th century), its inhabitants fled and took refuge inside the walls of the abandoned palace, setting up houses among the imperial halls: that is how the city of Split was born. Then came Venice (1420-1797), the Austrian Habsburgs, Tito's Yugoslavia and, with independence in 1991 and the war that followed, today's Croatia. The palace was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 and is still inhabited. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The central stretch of the Dalmatian coast, between Zadar and Split: Roman and Venetian cities, the only large town founded by the Croats (Šibenik), Diocletian's palace turned into a city and the waterfalls of the Krka. This is where the Fourth Crusade sacked Zadar in 1202.
Read the history of Northern Dalmatia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Almost every city is born first and builds its monuments afterwards. Split did the opposite: first the monument existed, and the city grew inside it. That monument is the palace a Roman emperor had built for himself so he could stop being emperor.
Where Split stands today there was first a modest Greek colony called Aspálathos, founded around the 4th-3rd centuries BC by colonists from the island of Vis (Issa). But the great city of the area was another: Salona, a few kilometres away, capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia, with some 60,000 inhabitants. And from Salona, or from nearby, came Diocletian, a soldier of humble origin who rose to the very top: emperor of Rome between 284 and 305.
Diocletian was an enormous and contradictory figure. He completely reorganised an empire in crisis, divided it to govern it better (the Tetrarchy) and stabilised its frontiers. But from the year 303 he also drove the last and most brutal persecution of Christians in Roman history, the so-called 'Great Persecution'. And, above all, he did something no other Roman emperor did of his own accord: he abdicated. In 305 he gave up power and retired, according to the famous anecdote, to tend his gardens and his cabbages.
For that retirement he had a colossal palace-fortress built, at the start of the 4th century, beside the coast, near his native Salona, in the bay of Aspálathos. It was no simple villa: it covered some 30,000 m², with walls, towers, four great gates, temples, a mausoleum for his own tomb and imperial apartments looking out to sea. There Diocletian died around 311, by then a retired emperor, watching his political creation — the Tetrarchy — collapse into civil wars. The palace remained an occasional imperial residence; in it, around 480, Julius Nepos, one of the last emperors of the Western Roman Empire, spent his final days.
For almost three centuries, Diocletian's palace was a grand but secondary building, in the shadow of populous neighbouring Salona. What turned it into a city was a catastrophe.
In the 7th century, waves of Avars and Slavic tribes swept the Dalmatian coast. Around the year 639 (the exact dates are debated, but the fact is certain), Salona was sacked and destroyed. Its inhabitants, terrified, fled: some to the nearby islands, others to the safest refuge at hand. And that refuge was the massive walls of Diocletian's old abandoned palace.
And so, around the middle of the 7th century, the refugees from Salona settled inside the palace. They set up their houses between the columns, divided the imperial halls, occupied the towers, transformed the temples. They turned Diocletian's pagan mausoleum into a Christian cathedral — a perfect irony, since they dedicated it to St Duje (Domnius), a bishop of Salona martyred during Diocletian's own persecutions. The small temple of Jupiter became a baptistery. An emperor's fortress became, unplanned, the core of a medieval city. They called it Spalatum, and from that comes Split.
This is why Split is unique in the world: it is not a Roman ruin visited from behind a rope, but an ancient palace that never stopped being lived in, layer upon layer, for thirteen hundred years. Even today some 3,000 people live within its walls. Split grew in Byzantium's orbit, administered from a distance, while inland the medieval kingdom of Croatia arose in the 10th century. In 1214, the craftsman Andrija Buvina carved the cathedral's famous wooden doors; in 1100 the bell tower that is still the city's symbol was raised. Split was making itself, Christian brick by Christian brick, on Rome's bones of stone.
Through the Middle Ages, Split was a city fought over by Byzantium, the kingdom of Hungary-Croatia and the rising Adriatic power: the Republic of Venice. After centuries of tug of war, Venice took definitive control of Split in 1420 and held it for almost four centuries, until 1797.
Under the 'lion of St Mark', Split was an important port and a frontier town. Its role was strategic: through the Klis pass, up in the mountains, ran the trade routes connecting the Venetian coast with the vast Ottoman Empire that dominated the Balkan interior. That closeness to the Turkish front shaped the city's life; it reinforced its walls and lived in permanent tension. In 1537 Klis fell, the fortress guarding the pass, after the death of its captain Petar Kružić, and the Ottomans stood at Split's gates.
Despite the wars, culture flourished. Marko Marulić (1450-1524), considered the father of Croatian literature, lived and wrote in Split: his epic poem 'Judita' (1501), written in Croatian, is a foundation stone of the language. The city, largely Croatian, kept a residue of the old Dalmatian Romance culture.
The end of Venice came with Napoleon: the Treaty of Campo Formio (1797) handed Dalmatia to the Austrian Habsburgs. There followed a brief and turbulent Napoleonic interlude — Split was part of the Kingdom of Italy and of the French Illyrian Provinces, which modernised the city, pulled down walls and opened streets — until the Congress of Vienna (1815) confirmed Split and all Dalmatia under the Austrian empire. Through the 19th century, as part of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, the city lived the awakening of nationalism: supporters of union with Croatia clashed with autonomists of Italian leaning, in a cultural and political struggle that foreshadowed the conflicts of the century to come.
With the end of the First World War and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918, Split became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which in 1929 would be called Yugoslavia. As nearby Rijeka, Trieste and Zadar had ended up in Italian hands, Split became the kingdom's most important port, and in 1925 the Lika railway finally connected it with the interior.
The Second World War was especially hard. After the Axis invasion in 1941, Split was occupied and annexed by fascist Italy, which folded it into its 'Province of Spalato'. The city, with a strong Croatian and antifascist identity, resisted: Partisan groups emerged, and even the Hajduk football club joined the resistance. After the Italian capitulation of 1943, Nazi Germany occupied it, with episodes of great violence. Finally, Josip Broz 'Tito's Partisans liberated Split on 26 October 1944, and the city became the provisional capital of liberated Croatia.
In Tito's socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1991), Split saw its greatest expansion: its population tripled, it industrialised (above all with the shipyards), it hosted the 1979 Mediterranean Games — for which the Poljud stadium was built — and it housed the headquarters of the Yugoslav Navy, becoming the country's largest passenger and military port.
The denouement came with the break-up of Yugoslavia. Croatia declared independence in 1991 and war broke out. Split, although it did not suffer urban fighting like Vukovar or Dubrovnik, lived through moments of extreme tension: it still had Yugoslav Navy barracks and ships inside it. The gravest episode came on 15 November 1991, when the Yugoslav Navy frigate 'Split' shelled the very city it was named after, causing damage and some casualties. By January 1992, Yugoslav forces had evacuated their installations. This is recent history, best told soberly and without sensationalism: the war of independence (1991-1995) left a deep mark on the whole of Croatia, and Split was rear guard, refuge and a key port of the Croatian war effort.
Recognition of Split's exceptional value had come as early as 1979, when UNESCO inscribed the 'Historical Complex of Split with the Palace of Diocletian' on the World Heritage list. What is protected is not just an ancient building but the extraordinary continuity of life inside it: a 4th-century Roman palace that, eighteen centuries later, is still a neighbourhood with residents, bars, churches and washing hung out to dry.
After the recession of the nineties, Split reinvented itself from the year 2000 by betting on tourism. Today it is Croatia's second city, the great transport hub of the south — with its airport, its motorways and the country's largest ferry port — and the gateway to the Dalmatian islands: Brač, Hvar, Vis, Korčula. It receives more than a million visitors a year, and the worldwide fame of series such as Game of Thrones (filmed in the palace and at the nearby Klis fortress) multiplied its appeal.
That success has its downside: in July and August the old town can feel overwhelmed by tourism and cruise ships, a saturation the city is trying to manage. But Split is above all an authentic Mediterranean city: the Riva at sunset, the coffee that lasts for hours, grilled fish, Hajduk driving its fans wild and the hill of Marjan as a green refuge. A place where history is not in a display case but under your feet, in the walls and in the daily life of people who, without thinking about it, live in a Roman emperor's palace.