Old Town of Zadar

August 26th

After an exciting, stormy night with lightning striking next(!) to our tent, we headed to Zadar today.

Passing the old fishery harbor Fosa, we entered the inner life of Zadar through one of the four city gates, the Land Gate. Our travel guide had already prepared us for an architectural balancing act today. On one hand, there are the ruins of the Forum from Roman times, and on the other hand, gaps caused by wars were filled in the 1960s.

We decided to just go with the flow, which led us to the truly worth seeing Romanesque round church Sv. Donat from the early 9th century in the historic center of Zadar. We were particularly impressed that the foundations are visible here. Fragments of the old Forum were used during the construction of the church, so the Byzantine round church simply stands on the remaining lying parts of round columns and artistically valuable parts of ancient buildings or palaces - unbelievable. Although this was not uncommon, the foundations are not normally visible.

From there, we continued past the old excavated Forum towards the sea. Souvenir stands, ticket booths for all kinds of excursions, hot corn on the cob, drink stands, and lots of visitors enlivened the wide promenade towards the harbor.

Zadar has also become known as a tourist attraction for its "Sea Organ". We have to admit that this was one of the main reasons for us to come here. An impressive and successful installation that transforms the motion of the waves into sounds. You can just listen to it or put your ear on the openings on the ground. It was mainly the children who distributed themselves around the holes and listened to the sounds while lying down, carefree and fascinated. A cute picture.

Right next to it, there is another installation, the "Greeting to the Sun". Here, the sunlight is captured during the day with solar panels and released as blue light into the evening sky in the darkness. However, we didn't want to stay here for too long today, because firstly the city didn't fascinate us as much, and secondly, it started to rain.

Bravely, we walked through a few more alleyways until we decided to call it a day.

During our obligatory and extensive "coffee visit" today, we thought about where we would continue our vacation tomorrow and chose a nice but distant destination.

So we will set off early tomorrow.