The sphinx in the corner of Diocletian’s Palace courtyard in Split has been standing there for nearly 4,000 years. It was a gift from the Egyptians to a Roman emperor, and today tourists walk past it on their way to get breakfast pastries. That combination of the monumental and the mundane is exactly what makes Croatia’s Dalmatian coast so quietly disorienting, in the best possible way. Malini Angelica arrived in Split having heard the same chorus of praise that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each summer, and set out to find whether the place could actually live up to it.
A Roman retirement home that became a city
Split’s old town is not built beside Diocletian’s Palace. It is built inside it. The 4th century AD structure the emperor commissioned as his personal retirement residence now contains apartments, restaurants, and bakeries, with walls that have been standing for over 1,700 years. The mausoleum where Diocletian was buried was eventually ransacked by Christian martyrs who converted it into what is considered one of the oldest churches in Europe. Standing in the circular atrium on the right afternoon, you might catch a local a cappella choir performing klapa, the traditional Dalmatian folk music, the harmonies bouncing off the same stone that once surrounded an emperor’s private quarters.
Breakfast inside the palace walls starts with burek. At a small local bakery, a staff member walked Angelica through the options: minced meat with onion, spinach with cheese, each wrapped in tissue-thin filo pastry. ‘I’m sure I will be back,’ Angelica told her after the first bite. The afternoon ended on a rooftop bar watching the sun drop behind the mountains and the waterfront, a view that confirmed Split had exceeded every expectation.
Island life, one cove and one konoba at a time
An hour-long ferry from Split reaches Hvar, one of the most visited islands in the region, though the quieter corners of it require a boat and a skipper willing to push through rough water. Gordon, a local skipper who has names for the fish that follow his boat, navigated through serious wind to reach a small cove tucked beside a tiny fishing village with a church on the beach and water so clear the seafloor is fully visible from the surface. He had also reserved a table at a family-run restaurant perched above the cove, where owner Eva explained that her family has been running the place for nearly 30 years, growing vegetables in their own garden and pressing olive oil from 500 trees on the hillside above. The house digestif, a homemade grappa-style drink, arrived without warning. Angelica’s reaction was immediate: ‘Oh my god. That is very very strong.’
On the quieter eastern side of Hvar, Gelena and Zoran have spent two years regenerating a plot of land into a farm-to-table guest house they call Plamea. Dinner there means peka, a slow-cooked dish prepared under a heavy bell in open fire, requiring several hours and, as Gelena noted with a straight face, roughly one and a half hours of Zoran sitting and drinking beer while it cooks. The wine came from a nearby friend’s konoba, a traditional stone cellar where Peter stores prut, cheese, and a two-year-old red made from a single local grape variety. His father is 90. Two cousins on the island are 93 and 95. When asked for the Croatian secret to long life, Peter did not hesitate: ‘Good wine, good sing, and beautiful woman.’
The island of Korcula, further down the coast, has a medieval walled town on a small peninsula with enormous mountains visible directly across the water. A family winery not far from the old town, operating since 2017 after the owners stopped selling their grapes to larger producers, poured a 2023 dry white with 14 percent alcohol aged in oak barrels. At the waterfront that afternoon, a local man waded in the shallows collecting sea urchins by hand, explaining that they never appear on tourist restaurant menus because, as he put it, the menus carry only what is expensive: ‘Nobody don’t want. There is tourist menu. There is only lobster.’
A fortress that survived empires
Dubrovnik, the final stop, is a city enclosed by stone walls built between the 11th and 13th centuries, stretching over 2 km around the old town. Those walls held off the Ottomans and the Venetians across centuries of assault, and held again when Dubrovnik came under bombardment after Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia. Walking the full circuit of the walls gives a view of the Adriatic on one side and the terracotta rooftops and mountains on the other.
Eva, at the table above 500 olive trees
Somewhere above the restaurant on the island of Hvar, Eva’s 500 olive trees cover the hillside in rows that follow the slope down toward the water. She has tended them for nearly three decades. The trees produce the olive oil that goes into every dish on the table below.
The sphinx in Diocletian’s courtyard was already ancient when the palace was new. It is still there, slightly worn at the edges, in a corner of a city that has simply kept growing around it.
