Roman through Zadar's history.....

What a glorious start to the day – 24 degrees and the sun glistening over the Adriatic. So we retraced our steps from yesterday afternoon, but stopped at the end of a pier opposite the old town and boarded a small wooden rowboat manned by a barkarioli – boatman – and rowed the 80 metres to the jetty below the town wall, saving a two kilometer walk. This transportation method is an 850-year tradition and is very romantic. The boatmen row back and forth from 6am to sunset every day of the year. It costs less than a dollar (four Croatian kuna) and makes you feel like you’ve stepped back to the late Middle Ages or the Renaissance.

We wandered around the old town visiting several churches and a monastery, and had a closer look at the Roman forum. The Cathedral of St Anastasia was built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and contains a beautiful marble sarcophagus containing the relics of St Anastasia, as well as lavishly carved choir stalls of the fifteenth century. St Simeon’s Church was reconstructed in the sixteenth century on the site of an earlier church. It also contains a sarcophagus, this time covered in the work of a medieval goldsmith.

The Church of St Donat dates from the ninth century and is an unusual (to our eyes) circular shape. The acoustics are wonderful and it is frequently used for concerts. The church was built over part of the Roman Forum and two complete columns from the forum have been built into the church, which means that we were touching columns shaped by man two thousand years ago. Across from the church stands a pillar from the Roman period that served as a “Shame Post” in the Middle Ages – wrongdoers were chained to the pillar and publicly humiliated.

The Franciscan Church and Monastery, consecrated in 1280, is the oldest gothic church in Dalmatia. It contains a wonderful original rendition, in Latin and Croatian, of the 1358 treaty under which Venice relinquished its rights to Dalmatia in favour of the Croatian and Hungarian King Ludovic. Measuring about one metre high by 600 wide, it is an exquisite example of the type of work produced by scribes of the era.

This evening – a walk along the waterfront towards the old town, another ride in the rowboat, dinner in the old town and then watch the ‘pyrotechnics’ of the Sun Salutation and listen to the eerie sounds of the Sea Organ. Tomorrow, the long bus trip down the Dalmatian coast from Zadar to Dubrovnik.