Split, Croatia (day 59) - March 6, 2023)
Exploring ruins of the past
Day 59
Woke up just in time to catch the sun rising over the hills from the balcony of our place. A lone fisherman in his boat happened to drift into the golden rays of sunlight.
The day’s activities started out with us missing our bus to Trogir, a town nearby, only by a couple minutes. Foolishly, I didn’t learn from my previous near miss at the ferry and was dragging my feet getting out the door :D Third time is the charm they say…
We ended up taking an Uber to some nearby ruins instead, which I had planned to go after visiting Trogir anyways. The Roman city of Salona are just a couple miles north of Split. The remains of the city walls, a forum, a theatre, amphitheatre, and other buildings can be seen.
Walking through the entrance to the park you get to a building where you are supposed to buy tickets to pass through a gate towards the ruins. Arriving at the door, we found it was locked, but the gate was open to the ruins so we walked through. A few minutes later we were stopped by a man who had been picking up trash around the ruins. He happened to be one of the workers at the park and he walked us back so we could pay for the entry. He was very friendly and told us a little bit about the ruins. We went our separate ways after a few minutes and Joel and I set out through the ruins. Attacks on Salona by the Avars and Slavs left the majority of the site in its current state.
The most interesting place to me was the amphitheatre. The little kid in me thought it is really cool, like aww yeah, the gladiators! But walking through the arena, I was filled with some somberness. People, Christians and slaves, fighting to the death for ‘sport’. It is a twisted world we live in.
The amphitheatre was our last stop in the park. Unfortunately, we missed the area where the old theatre ruins were at. Backtracking towards the entrance, we bumped into the caretaker who had stopped us at beginning of our walkthrough. We chatted for somewhere around 15 or 20 minutes. His name is Tomislav, he comes from an Illyrian family and grew up in the area nearby. The Illyrians lived in the land before the Romans invaded and built up Salona and the Palace in Split. Tomislav had graduated as a historian and archeologist, but it is a very competitive field with too many people graduating at the same time. He mentioned a few times that he wished he did something bigger, he felt he did small, maybe unimportant work as a groundskeeper at the park. There is a quote from J.R.R. Tolkien that came to mind after the fact. “I have found that it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folks that keeps the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.” There are all kinds of roles to play in life, but even the ‘small’ tasks are important to keep things moving.
Eventually we said farewell and headed back to the Palace area in Split. We explored some of the basement area in the Palace. It is quite an extensive area which amazingly still holds up everything on the streets above after all these years. Good old Roman engineering :)
You are exactly where God planned for you to be at this exact moment…
The first 26 days of my trip can be found at: https://jwworldtour2023.blogspot.com/
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