Dubrovnik, Croatia
Our next stop is Dubrovnik, one of the most beautiful cities in the Mediterranean. We tour Dubrovnik’s top sites — fortifications, churches, and the TV-famous Jesuit Stairs — while taking time to explore the many charming passageways of this formal regional power.
A fleet of buses met us and hundreds of others at Dubrovnik’s cruise-ship port to take passengers to various tours of the old city. After a 15-minute drive, we arrived at the drop-off area just outside Dubrovnik’s impressive fortifications. Our driver needed a few minutes to wade through a busy queue of buses to find a spot that would allow us to disembark. A steady progression of tour groups lay ahead of us like conga lines led by guides with lollipop sticks.
As Marianne and I waited for our turn to enter the city, we wandered over to the small harbor for a picturesque view of Fort Lovrijenac, which dates to the 11th century and is known as “Dubrovnik’s Gibralter.”
Originally known as Ragusa, Dubrovnik was first settled in the 7th century as a Dalmatian city-state, fending off barbarian attacks after the fall of the Roman Empire. By the 12th century, the city had become a growing and prosperous commercial outpost under the protection of the Byzantine Empire. It came under the sovereignty of Venice in the 13th and 14th centuries, then enjoyed relative independence as a vassal-state of the Kingdom of Hungary. By the 16th century, Dubrovnik had blossomed into an Adriatic maritime empire rivaled only by the Venetians.
We entered Dubrovnik through the Pile Gate on the west end of the city. The outer gate here dates to 1537, and the inner gate behind it dates to 1460. Napoleon famously came through this set of gates in 1806, signaling the beginning of the end of the Dubrovnik Republic and the inclusion of its territory into the French Empire’s client state, the Napoleonic Empire of Italy.
Despite enduring cannon fire over the centuries, a massive earthquake in 1667, and even artillery bombardment during the Croatian War of Independence in the 1990s, Dubrovnik is remarkably well-preserved. George Bernard Shaw famously described it as “paradise on Earth.”
Just inside the Pile Gate is a collection of historical jewels: The tiny 16th-century Church of St. Salvation nestles against a 14th-century Franciscan monastery, just across from Large Onofrio’s Fountain, a 16-tap springwater fountain built by Onofrio di Giordano della Cava in 1438 and decorated with ornate, carved-stone masks.
The monastery leads on to Stradun, a wide, limestone-paved pedestrian street that serves as the main thoroughfare for the old city. The street emerged in the 13th century, but much of its architecture dates to the post-earthquake reconstruction of the 17th century.
Stradun terminates near St. Blaise’s Church, a Venetian Baroque-style structure built in 1715 on the foundations of a Romanesque medieval church. St. Blaise is the patron saint of Dubrovnik and was the protector of the Republic of Ragusa. Medieval Slavs identified him with the pagan god Veles, who was said to rule the earth, waters, forests, underworld, music, magic, trickery, wealth, and — for good measure — cattle.
Around the corner, we stopped beneath the elegant archways and finely decorated columns of Rector’s Palace, a 14th-century Gothic-Renaissance building that now houses a museum. From there, we could see the stately Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, or Dubrovnik Cathedral.
Our tour swerved through the Gundulić Square open-air market, bustling with customers sifting through a wide selection of lavender-based products, along with fruits and vegetables, locally produced Grappa, and other native specialties. In the middle of the square stands a statue of Ivan Gundulić, who was born in Dubrovnik in 1589 and is considered to be Croatia’s national poet.
We passed briefly by the Jesuit Stairs, which feature prominently — along with other landmarks in Dubrovnik and elsewhere in Croatia — in the hit TV show, Game of Thrones. The stairs lead up to the 18th-century Jesuit Church of St. Ignatius. But here the deft ballet of rotating tour groups had clogged into a mass of human beings, and we left the scene quickly.
Dubrovnik’s grand historic buildings are attractive and elegant, but the real joy of seeing this city is leaving the tour route to explore Dubrovnik’s many side streets and alleyways. Here you can come across breathtaking views and relative quiet, welcome respites from the theme-park atmosphere of Dubrovnik’s main sights. We stopped for a pizza lunch on one of these little streets and enjoyed a moment of peace in the shade.
After lunch, we doubled back to the cathedral, which was built on the site of several earlier cathedrals. One of those was a 12th-century basilica funded in part by Richard the Lionheart as thanks for help in surviving a shipwreck off the coast of Dubrovnik upon his return from the Third Crusade. That building was largely destroyed in the earthquake of 1667, and the current building was completed in 1715.
The Roman Catholic cathedral appears fairly simple at first glance. But above its main altar is a polyptych by Titian, painted around 1552, portraying a version of the Assumption of the Virgin. Its treasury also contains more than 100 reliquaries from the 11th to the 19th centuries, including a piece of the True Cross and the gold-plated head, arm, and leg of St. Blaise.
We wandered over to the small port just outside the city walls, where working boats mixed with pleasure craft and patrons at open-air restaurants sipped coffees after lunch. Marianne signaled that we had officially crossed over from the “tour” portion of our visit to the critical “shopping” segment of the day. I would no longer be leading the way with my maps and historical insights but would transition to a supporting role, providing my feedback and credit card for potential purchases.
We spent the afternoon meandering through the streets — climbing stairs that ascend from the sides of the city and poking our heads into charming shops with unexpected delights — before returning to the crowds to find our bus back to the ship.