Diocletian's Palace: 1,700 Years of One Building in Split

Roman cities are usually ruins you visit with a ticket. Diocletian's Palace is not. People live in it, work in it, shop in it and eat dinner in it, and its corridors are somebody's daily route to the office. That difference is what makes Split unusual, and it is also the reason this monument survives so well.

An imperial residence, finished around 305

The palace was built for the emperor Diocletian on the coast near the region of his birth, and occupied around the year 305, when he stepped down from power. Diocletian was the only Roman emperor to give up the throne voluntarily and grow old as a private citizen, in a building he had put up for exactly that.

It was part military camp and part luxurious villa: a walled rectangle with four gates, streets crossing at right angles, and the imperial apartments facing the sea. It covers roughly four hectares, about the size of ten football pitches.

The town that moved into the palace

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire the palace was not abandoned. The opposite happened: people from nearby Salona, fleeing invasion, moved inside its walls and turned imperial halls, corridors and cellars into houses, streets and squares.

That unbroken occupation is why the palace is one of the best preserved Roman monuments in the world today. It was not archaeology that saved it but residents: the walls stand because they were somebody's house wall. People still live inside them.

What you can see of it today

Peristil is the central square of the palace, the ceremonial courtyard ringed by Corinthian columns where the emperor appeared before his subjects. It is now the liveliest part of the old town, and the square Lvxor stands on.

Three things visible from it are worth understanding together. The Cathedral of St Domnius was originally Diocletian's mausoleum, so the tomb of an emperor who persecuted Christians became a church dedicated to a Christian martyr of his own reign. Facing it stands the baptistery, once the Temple of Jupiter. And at the edge of the square lies an Egyptian sphinx, older than the whole palace by roughly seventeen centuries.

Beneath all of it are the substructures. Buried for centuries, they are walkable today and valuable because their floor plan matches that of the imperial apartments that once stood above them and did not survive.

From Robert Adam to UNESCO

The palace entered European consciousness partly through drawings. The Scottish architect Robert Adam spent several weeks in 1757 measuring the ruins and published a lavish volume of engravings in 1764 that influenced European neoclassicism. His view of Peristil still hangs on walls in Split, including ours.

In 1979 UNESCO added Diocletian's Palace and the historic centre of Split to its World Heritage list.

How to walk it

The palace is not toured in order; it is walked through. Enter by the Golden Gate from the north, come down to Peristil, drop into the substructures and come out on the seafront through the southern gate. That is about fifteen minutes on foot and the entire history of the building in one line.

The best hours are early morning or late evening, when the guided groups are not there. Lvxor is open from 8 until midnight, so it covers both.