Crews Letter #2004 25
THE
Up at
We had a quick conversation with the friendly young Israeli couple at the next table who had offered to take our group photo with Fred’s digital camera.
At 11:00 a.m., on to the tour office beside the main entrance of the palace in the crowded “peristyle,” again with a costumed polka trio, where we met Boris, our english-speaking Splicani guide, very tall, very thin, hawkfaced with silky black hair and eyes and a shy smile of even white teeth.
He took a long time under the entry arch explaining the complexities, historical and current, of Balkan politics, where Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox divisions of dogma turned neighbors into enemies. He led us into the echoing open-roofed stone rotunda, explaining the Roman building plan for ceremonial spaces, square outside, or, in the case of the cathedral, formerly main temple, octagonal outside, circular inside. He showed us the four tall arched wall niches where formerly resided statues of Diocletian’s gods, Jupiter, the main god of whom Diocletian considered himself the son, and three others, identities uncertain, whom the last pagan Roman emperor, before the Christian Constantine, worshipped.
Boris showed us the red granite columns brought like the polished black sphinx from Egypt, where Rome ruled at the time (300 A.D.) and explained that the plan of the palace, a private retirement home for Diocletian, was a walled rectangle, bisected north-south and east-west by broad paved avenues, which Roman soldiers could march ten abreast, to a gate in the center of each wall. The west half of the rectangle was Diocletian’s private area with the best view of the harbor and sea, private living quarters in the northwest quadrant, ceremonial rooms and main temple in the southwest quadrant, and military and civilian quarters and service areas in the eastern half.
Boris pointed out the original portions of the Roman walls inside the palace, much patched with newer bricks and, in places, only knee high, and led us past Jupiter’s small white temple through the narrowest of the narrow alleyways to the north gate through the now bohemian, formerly Jewish, southwest quadrant, past a still operating nunnery, out the east gate fronting on a park dominated by a tall Merlinesque bronze statue with a lucky toe polished told by supplicant hands, and back to the west gate where he bid us goodbye on the esplanade at 1:00 p.m.
We immediately repaired to the former crypt beneath the Jupiter temple for pizzas under an umbrella in the tiny courtyard. After, Fred and Phyllis returned to Perception for afternoon rest. Conrad and I, for 5 kuna each, climbed the steep interior and exterior spiral stone steps of the campanile to the bell level, then up metal-grate steps to the top. From there, over the red-tiled roofs, the Roman walls and interior layout of the palace could be pieced together.
I tried to but couldn’t find a shop of locally embroidered blouses and purses, as seen but not purchased on Mljet.
