Old Town: Inside Dubrovnik's Walls

The full story of Old Town: Inside Dubrovnik's Walls, in words. Prefer to listen? Play it narrated, from home or on location.

1. 1. Brsalje Terrace: The Forts Guarding the West

   Welcome to Dubrovnik. You are on the Brsalje terrace, just outside the city's western gate, and the view across the little bay is the best introduction to this place. On the rock opposite, thirty-seven metres high, stands Fort Lovrijenac, named after Saint Lawrence, whose church once stood up there. It is first recorded in thirteen oh one, and tradition takes it back further still. Over its gate, at the top of the stairway, too high to read from here, is carved a line of Latin: Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro. Freedom is not sold for all the gold in the world. Keep that line in mind. This city did pay a great deal of gold to stay free, as you will hear. It just never sold the freedom itself. In fourteen sixty-four the fort's western and northern walls were doubled in thickness, to as much as twelve metres in places. And like every fortress of the Republic, it had a noble commander appointed for just one month at a time, the same short term the Republic gave its own head of state. Now find the rounded fort built out on the corner of the city wall, down at the water's edge, to the left of Lovrijenac as you face it. That is Bokar. Work on it began in fourteen sixty-one, to a design by the Florentine architect Michelozzo, and then dragged on for a century; it reached its present shape only in fifteen seventy. It guards the sea approach to these western walls and to the gate beside you. It was once called the tower of Brsalje, after a shooting range that lay across the moat, and this terrace still carries the name. Lovrijenac has had later lives. In nineteen oh seven, after the Austrian garrison left, it was leased out to become a hotel. The people of Dubrovnik protested, and the next year it was handed to a local society instead. Today it is a summer stage, best known for Hamlet, and on television it played the Red Keep in Game of Thrones. When you are ready, walk back along the terrace past the café to the stone bridge, and cross it into the outer gate. Go down the stairs between the two gates, through the inner gate, and stop as soon as the long, polished main street opens out in front of you.

2. 2. Pile Gate: The Great Onofrio Fountain

   You have come in through the Pile Gate, the oldest entrance to the city. Over the inner gate stands Saint Blaise, the city's patron, by the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović, from the nineteen twenties; an older Saint Blaise watches from a niche over the outer gate. These gates were guarded day and night, and every evening the keys went to the rector. On your right is the big round fountain with the open dome, the Great Onofrio Fountain. In June fourteen thirty-six the city signed a contract with two masters, Onofrio della Cava, from the Kingdom of Naples, and Andreuzo de Bulbito, to bring water here from springs about twelve kilometres away. In the spring of fourteen thirty-seven plague stopped the work and drove the government out of the city until October. Within about a month of coming back, it signed the contract for this fountain's foundations. The fountain was finished in the early fourteen forties, and water still runs from the carved heads around its sixteen sides. What you see is only the lower part of the original. It once rose to a tall domed crown, with a column and a jet of water on top and carved animals around it. The earthquake of sixteen sixty-seven damaged that crown, and it was never rebuilt as it was. One of the animals, a stone dog, still survives in the walls society's collection of old stones. On your left, the little church with the curved, three-lobed top is Saint Saviour. After an earthquake in May fifteen twenty killed twenty people, the Senate vowed to build it, and it was finished in fifteen twenty-eight. When the great earthquake came a century and a half later, it hardly suffered. The stairway beside it is the main way up onto the city walls. In December nineteen ninety-one, during the siege of the city, shells hit the bridge you have just crossed and damaged this fountain. You will hear more about that siege as you go. Now walk on along the main street, and stop a little way on, beside the long wall of the church on your left, opposite its carved doorway.

3. 3. Franciscan Monastery: The Old Pharmacy

   On your left runs the long south wall of the Franciscan church, and in it a carved doorway from fourteen ninety-eight, the work of the Petrović brothers. In the pointed gable at the top sits a Pietà, Mary holding her dead son, with Saint Jerome and Saint John the Baptist at the sides and God the Father above. The friars first lived outside the walls, near the gate you came through. In thirteen seventeen, when war was declared against the Serbian king, the city pulled their monastery down, and they moved in here. In the middle of the fourteenth century they built a cloister, largely the work of a master from the town of Bar, with pairs of slender columns whose capitals are carved with dragons, beasts and human heads. It is inside, with a ticket. So is the pharmacy. The friars date it to thirteen seventeen, the year they moved in here, because its early records were lost. They describe it as one of the oldest in Europe, and probably the oldest to have kept working without a break. And it still works: just inside the monastery entrance a pharmacy serves customers, while the old one is kept as a museum room in the cloister. Why were the records lost? On the morning of the sixth of April sixteen sixty-seven, the Wednesday before Easter, the great earthquake struck. This building stood. Then fire spread from the houses next door, and took the church, a wing of the monastery and the library. The librarian, Brother Vital, wrote afterwards that he could not remember the library without tears in his eyes. The bell tower lost its top, and the round cupola you can see replaced its old spire. In the siege of nineteen ninety-one and ninety-two, the monastery took thirty-seven direct hits, the most of any church or monastery on the city's damage list. Through the siege the friars handed out water and food here, and gave rooms to a clinic. Walk on along the main street, and stop about halfway along it, where narrow stepped lanes climb away on both sides.

4. 4. Stradun: The Main Street Rebuilt After 1667

   This is the Placa, better known as the Stradun, the main street of old Dubrovnik: two hundred and ninety-eight metres from gate to gate, from the Pile Gate behind you to the far gate beyond the bell tower. Well over a thousand years ago you would have been standing in the sea. A shallow arm of water divided the first settlement, on its rock, from the mainland, and it was filled in to make one town. Notice how the side lanes meet the street at right angles, climbing steeply on both sides. That is planning. A city statute of twelve seventy-two fixed the town plan, and after a great fire in twelve ninety-six new rules made every cross street meet the Placa square on. The houses are later. Until sixteen sixty-seven the Stradun had arcades along its north side and fine palaces in Gothic and Renaissance style. The earthquake and the fire that followed destroyed most of them, and the street you see was rebuilt in the decades after, in one plain pattern, house after matching house. Look at the ground floors: each shop has its door and its window under a single arch. How many died in that earthquake is still argued over. The Croatian Encyclopedia gives about twelve hundred. A modern estimate puts it at about two thousand inside the walls, perhaps half of everyone then living here. The archbishop, writing from a boat full of refugees three days later, claimed fourteen thousand. A report that reached Italy said the sea drew back from the harbour at the moment of the shock. Three centuries later the street was hit again. In the siege of nineteen ninety-one and ninety-two, the Stradun took forty-five direct hits. On the sixth of December nineteen ninety-one, a young photographer, Pavo Urban, was killed in the city while he recorded the shelling. He was twenty-three. One of his photographs is called The Death of the Stradun. Carry on toward the bell tower, about a hundred metres, and read the names on the corners of the lanes to your left. After Boškovićeva comes Žudioska, Jewish Street: turn up it and climb a few steps. If you reach the lane named Kovačka, you have gone one lane too far.

5. 5. Žudioska: The Jewish Street and Synagogue

   This steep lane is Žudioska, Jewish Street. In fifteen forty-six the Republic allowed Jews to live inside the walls, here, and the lane became the ghetto. It was not simple kindness. Some thirty years earlier the city had ordered Jews expelled, and in fifteen oh two a Jewish…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

6. 6. Dominican Monastery: The Church Inside the Walls

   Ahead of you is the church of the Dominican monastery, which the friars call the oldest monastery still in existence in Dubrovnik. It began almost by accident. Around twelve twenty-five, friars on their way to Palestine stopped here, preached, and were asked to stay. In twelve…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

7. 7. Luža Square: Orlando, Sponza and the Bell Tower

   This is Luža Square, the working heart of the Republic, and nearly everything around you was about trade, law and time. The knight on the column beside you is Orlando, the Roland of the old legends, set up in fourteen eighteen and carved by Bonino of Milan. Proclamations and…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

8. 8. Old Port: The Harbour That Paid for It All

   This is the old harbour, and it paid for almost everything you have seen. In the sixteenth century the Republic's merchant fleet counted between a hundred and seventy and two hundred large ships and some four thousand seamen, sailing as far as England and Flanders, Syria and…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

9. 9. Cathedral of the Assumption: Titian and the Treasury

   Face the steps of the big domed church: this is the Cathedral of the Assumption, and its main door looks north, toward the Rector's Palace. It is at least the fourth church on this spot. Beneath it, digging after an earthquake in nineteen seventy-nine found the remains of a…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

10. 10. Rector's Palace: A Ruler for One Month

    On your right is the Rector's Palace, the seat of the Republic's government, and the home, one month at a time, of its head of state. From thirteen fifty-eight until the end of the Republic, the rector served for a single month, and could not be elected again for two years. He…

    Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

11. 11. Gundulić Square: The Poet of Liberty

    The bronze figure on the tall base is Ivan Gundulić, the great poet of the Republic, born here in fifteen eighty-nine and dead here at forty-nine, in sixteen thirty-eight. He sat in the Senate, and a few months before he died he was elected to the small council that ran the city…

    Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

12. 12. Jesuit Stairs: Saint Ignatius and the View Back

    You have climbed the Jesuit Stairs, and the Baroque church front looking out over this square is Saint Ignatius. The stairway was built in seventeen thirty-eight, and a historian working in the city's archives credits it to Pietro Passalacqua, an architect from Rome who was in…

    Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.