Klapa and Peristil: Why Split's Oldest Square Sounds Like a Concert Hall

Peristil was not designed as a concert hall, but it behaves like one. It is closed on three sides, faced in stone that returns sound rather than absorbing it, and the steps up to the cathedral make a natural auditorium. That is why it has drawn singers for centuries, and why an unamplified human voice sounds better there than in most halls built for the purpose.

What klapa is

Klapa is multipart singing without instruments, from Dalmatia. The word originally means a company, a group of friends, and that describes fairly precisely how it works: a first tenor begins, the others come in one by one and build the harmony around him. Klapa groups were traditionally male; today there are female and mixed groups too.

In 2012 UNESCO added klapa singing to the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It is not a folkloric attraction invented for visitors but a living practice still kept up across Dalmatia, most often entirely informally.

Peristil as a stage

The square also has a formal theatrical history. The Split Summer Festival, founded in the middle of the twentieth century, has staged opera and drama on Peristil for decades, and performances on that stone remain among the best known images of the city's cultural life. The audience sits on the same steps where guests drink coffee today.

Things like this are staged on Peristil as events: klapa singing, a folk dance such as the Dalmatian kolo, and sometimes a historical tableau with an emperor and Roman soldiers. The square needs no conversion for any of it, because it is already a stage.

The best place to watch from

Lvxor's cushions on the steps look straight out onto the square, so whatever happens on it can be followed sitting down. With a glass of wine or a cocktail, and a plate in the middle: the Dalmatian cheese selection or the Dalmatian prosciutto, both of which are served outside.

Alongside that, Lvxor's live music plays every evening of the season, from 8 until 11 on the square in front of us. Our own musicians play, sometimes solo and sometimes as a small group, working through well-known pop, soul and R&B hits. In winter the programme moves indoors beneath the stone vaults, mostly at weekends.

How to listen to the square

If you want to hear Peristil as it actually sounds, come outside the peak of the day. Early in the morning, before the guided groups arrive, and late in the evening once the square has emptied, footsteps and voices carry from one end to the other. This is the same space that was once meant to amplify the appearance of an emperor before his subjects, and it still does its job.

Seating is on cushions on the ancient steps, facing out onto the square.