Stari Grad
Hvar

STARI GRAD, HVAR - A SHORT GUIDE TO CROATIA'S OLDEST TOWN

By Owen Lipsett

“Stari Grad” literally means “Old Town” in Croatian and considering that it’s the most ancient continuously inhabited settlement in Croatia, this is fitting.

Founded by Ionian Greeks from Syracuse at the foot of a deep, mile-long bay that today shares its name in 385 BC, it was also adjacent to fertile farmland, with the result that it quickly became agriculturally self-sufficient.

This bounty was a double-edged sword, however, as it made the settlement a valuable prize for the litany of peoples who that passed through the ancient Adriatic.

By the Middle Ages, Croatians formed the town’s demographic core, and while Venice assumed political control, it exerted far less cultural influence than in mainland Dalmatia.

Together with the island’s position on shipping routes throughout the Adriatic and the booming of its wine trade in the sixteenth century, this allowed Stari Grad (along with Hvar Town) to become one of the greatest centers of the Croatian Renaissance, to which period its most attractive buildings date.

Fittingly, they’re within sight of some haphazardly marked Roman ruins, giving a physical presence to the movement’s intellectual antecedents.

The Tvrdalj, the town’s most famous and evocative building, makes up the heart of the old Renaissance town that’s still evident on the south side of the harbor. It seems somehow fitting that it was undergoing restoration when I visited as it took sixty years to build.

Petar Hektorović (1487-1572), a local nobleman and one of the greatest poets of the Croatian Renaissance, ordered its construction in 1514 to serve as both his summer house and a refuge for the local population should the town be attacked.

Mindful of the area’s history of peasant uprisings and of a more egalitarian sensibility than most of his contemporaries, Hektorović intended the Tvrdalj to be rustic and unadorned. Its extensive gardens featured a mullet-pond, intended to provide food should the populace be besieged.

Venetian commanders assisted with the construction, as this freed them of the responsibility to actually defend the town from marauders, the Tvrdalj was still unfinished in 1571, when Uluz Ali raided Stari Grad and razed Hvar Town to the ground.

After Hektorović’s death his descendants his now largely symbolic project, although its rather more ornate modern appearance owes to renovations by the Nisiteo family who purchased it from his heirs in 1834.

The nearby Bianchini Palace and Dominican Cloister (belatedly crowned with a turret after Ali’s attack) are the only other remnants of Stari Grad’s Golden Age.

Modern Stari Grad is a quiet, laid back resort. Even in the off-season the contrast with Hvar Town is readily apparent. Walking its streets gives one the feeling not so much that they have been preserved (as Hvar Town’s have) but rather that they simply haven’t changed much.

Monuments from the Venetian, Hapsburg, and Yugoslav periods silently and subtly coexist. As the town’s lone visitor on a March afternoon, it occurred to me that this may be a more accurate and powerful record than one can find in even the world’s greatest museums.

HVAR ACCOMMODATION

Looking for a nice play to stay when visting Hvar?