Stari Grad

 Sorry for the long delay since my last post, I just had to get everything together and actually sit down long enough to write. I've mentioned stari grad before, but now I have seen it enough that I can actually talk about it. In addition to the daily classes that we take with Professor Tomislav, there are also weekly tours/activities that we do in order to get a more physical appreciation and understanding of the country.

The first week's activity was a tour from Sanja, one of the professors. She gave us a presentation and then walked us around stari grad. It is a really cool place, with a ton of old architecture and particularly impressive churches. On the right is a picture of the southeast entrance to the city. As you can see from the pictures below the city is right by the water, so at the southeastern edge of Zadar. It is closed in by a very large wall that surrounded the original Roman colonized city.

 I am sure that the architecture and preserved buildings are not exclusively Roman, but Roman influence is by far the strongest. On your left you can see the original Roman forum, with most of the original building and columns having been destroyed by earthquake, erosion, and more recently from the World Wars. The streets are also organised in a very traditionally Roman fashion with a rectangular street plan and only traversed by foot. Shops, bakeries, stalls, and street vendors line the road, more especially now that the city is heading into tourist season.

And on your right you can see a picture of the Church of St. Donatus. It is one of the more striking of the many churches found in Zadar, with the accompanying bell tower right beside it. There are many more churches and old Greek buildings in the city. What is especially impressive with how the city is layed out is how nearly all of these buildings are functionally used, not maintained and preserved as a part of a exhibition like you might expect. The people live in and use these buildings in this historic part of the city.

I was not able to take any pictures of this part, but for the trip during the second week, we were taken into a religious relic exhibition that is contained within the Church of St. Nediljica. We were given a very interesting tour by one of the nuns who helps to maintain it. It houses a very large amount of religious art and artifacts, some of which are over a thousand years old! If you google search "The Silver and Gold of Zadar" and look under images you should be able to see some of what I am talking about. The strange gold hands that you see are called reliquaries, or vessels to contain remains of saints and other important religious figures. It was a very interesting tour and it was layed out in chronological order, so it was very cool to see the relics change as time went by. The nun was also extremely nice and spoke what I think was five different languages. She also happens to like basketball.

Well, that is stari grad, a historical landmark and very fun to just walk around. Shown on the left is the northwest exit, where many ferries are docked and where there is a bridge leading to the city proper. The actual city is much bigger than stari grad, and has way more than I could ever hope to explore in my six weeks.







Also, I quickly found out that most of stari grad lights up at night, which if you find the right spot looks absolutely beautiful reflecting off of the water. My attempts at capturing it are shown below.