engleski

Public and Private Space in Medieval Towns of the Dalmatian Coast

Each of the five principal Dalmatian coastal towns (Zadar, Šibenik, Trogir, Split and Dubrovnik) has a history of its own. The most important urban centres of the Roman antiquity managed, one way or another, to survive the Völkerwanderungszeit. Those towns or, speaking more precisely, their urban communities (in certain cases on new locations) were to play a leading role in the medieval and modern history of the Croatian lands. While Zadar and Trogir grew on the locations of their prehistoric and Roman predecessors (Iader and Tragurium), the medieval Split emerges when the refugees from nearby Salonae (capital city of Roman province Dalmatia) choosed to settle the palace built for the Emperor Diocletianus in the period of Late-antiquity. The town of Dubrovnik was, likewise, founded by the inhabitants of a Roman colonia Epidaurum. Entirely different is the case of Šibenik, the only Dalmatian town founded in Middle Ages which retained its status until the present day. Mentioned for the first time in 1066, it became the Episcopal seat, i.e. the civitas, only in 1298, despite the fact that the local church didn't have ecclesiastical traditions from the antiquity. During the medieval centuries, the architectural and town-planning activity in Dalmatian towns were, naturally, subject to different constraints, primarily the ones concerning the existing, previously built structures. The role of the Municipal councils in the process is reflected in the related chapters of the municipal law-books. Each of the towns had its own Liber statutorum. The statuta of Zadar, Trogir and Split do not contain as many data on urban development and building activity as the ones from Šibenik (14th-mid-16th cc) and Dubrovnik (mid-13th c.). Both of them give us a particularly valuable information on the methods in which the legislators tried to solve the vital problems concerning the public and subsequently more and more church-owned and private spaces and buildings. The most important, however, from the point of view of an art-historian are indications of the earlier, i.e. pre-communal, spatial models of urban dwelling-houses, particularly well preserved in Dubrovnik' legislation. The data from the existing written sources are, of course, only a pretext for the study of monuments that are still standing or could be discernible in situ. The author intends to point out to the principal features of Dalmatian urban housing in Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance period, especially the ones regarding the changing nature of their relations to the privately owned or public spaces that surrounded them during centuries.

Dalmatia; Towns; Middle Ages; Urban Development; Urban Legislation; Civic Architecture

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