SPLIT CITY GUIDE: Church of Saint Dominic

Hello! Today I shall write about Split city, Croatia.  While we were walking around the old city centre this morning, I asked my husband to take a few photographs of me in front of this historical church. The reason for it being simply that I recalled that I have a post about this church in my blogger drafts. So, why not finish up this draft and publish it? I'll probably come back to this post in the future to add links and edit it. I'm typing this on my cellphone as I haven't brought my laptop with me. 

The church of saint Dominic and its accompanying monastery are located in the city centre. The Dominican church and monastery were originally build in the immediate vicinity of walls of Diocletian's palace and this is where you can still find them, facing the  'silver gates'. What are these silver gates you might ask?  

What we call old Split city or Split centre is basically a palace of emperor Diocletian who retired here when he willing abdicated his throne (the only Roman empire who has ever done that). In those ancient times, there were four large doors on every side of the palace, made of gold, silver, copper and iron. Today you can see the actual doors but you can see the impressive stone structure and imagine how monumental those doors must have looked in the ancient times. 

 This church was first mentioned in the 13 th century. Its present structure dates back to 17 th century and in 19 th century it was .

"The new grand high altar of Carrara marble was made in 1898 in the workshop of carver Pavle Bilinić (1860-1954), as shown by written documentation preserved in the monastic archives. The drawings for most of the altars from this workshop were made by Bilinić’s father-in-law, the engineer Emil Vecchietti (1830-1901), who after his studies in Padua and Venice became a drawing teacher in Split. He produced plans for churches in Vela Luka, Solin, Kaštel Kambelovac, the Orthodox churches in Dubrovnik and Skradin, the Katalinić House in Split, the altar of the Split Dominicans, and altars in churches in Solin and Imotski. He was a teacher of the young Emanuel Vidović and Ivan Meštrović. He was helped in the production of designs for altars and monumental masonry by his daughter Regina, married to Bilinić. In the making of the altars, particularly the sculptural parts, the greatest part was played by the Italian sculptor Arturo Ferraroni from Milan, who taught Meštrović and Rosandić and took part in the renovation of the ruined campanile of the Church of St Mark in Venice. Bilinić’s workshop took part in numbers of operations such as the reconstruction of the Old City Council Chamber in Split, the First Popular Dalmatian Bank, the extension of the Prokurativa, the Perović Building on the waterfront, and the convent and church of the Poor Clares. A number of very high quality altars are in existence, like that of Our Lady of Lourdes in the Jesuits, in Kaštel Lukšić and Kaštel Kambelovac, in churches in Imotski, Solin and Sumartin. The high altar in the Dominican church with its mensa and baldachin is counted among the most monumental altars in Dalmatia. The central statue of Our Lady of the Rosary was transferred from an earlier high altar, while at the sides are the Ferraroni statues of St Dominic and St Catherine of Siena. " 1 

1. Source Duško Kečemet, The high altar of church of the saint Dominic in Split  ( taken from here )

Thank you for reading!