Iron Gate

When the northern and eastern entrances to the palace were closed, an overland road ran through this western passage from old Split to the quarters by People’s Square. Between its walls, city judges heard cases, while the parties to disputes and witnesses sat on five broad stone rows. Later, the rows were dismantled, and shops occupied the chamber by the city’s central entrance for almost three centuries. Horizontal traces from the benches and the rougher masonry of the former shops are still visible on the side walls.

Inside Iron Gate, the passage widens into a rectangular chamber measuring roughly nine by ten meters. Roman builders installed two pairs of gates here and left the space between them for the guard: anyone entering found themselves locked between the outer and inner gate leaves. Slots for a portcullis survive in the side stones. Such a portcullis, wooden or metal, is mentioned as early as a document from fifteen oh three; researchers associate the later name Iron Gate with it.

In the Middle Ages, the northern and eastern entrances to the palace were closed. The western passage became the main overland route between the old core of Split and the quarters that grew up on the side of People’s Square. People passed through the former Roman gateway, and city judges held hearings directly inside it. Five broad stone rows were built along each of the northern and southern walls. Judges, litigants, and witnesses sat on them; rulings were proclaimed, contracts concluded, and certified documents issued here. The defensive courtyard of the imperial palace became a public courtroom.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the stone rows were dismantled. The court moved out, and the passage stood empty. In sixteen sixty-seven, Captain Petar Tartaglia, the brothers Frane and Ivan Cavalli, and Domenik Gatina asked permission to build a shop against one of the walls. All four belonged to well-off families; judging by their status, the site beside the city’s main passage interested them as real estate, not as a counter for their own trade. They received permission. Other shops appeared between the gates after the first structure, and the former courtroom became a commercial corridor for almost three centuries.

After the Second World War, the Dalmatian conservator Cvito Fisković directed the clearing of the palace. He ordered the shops removed and noticed horizontal traces of the vanished rows on the exposed Roman walls. Stone weathered differently in the open air where steps had once adjoined it. Archival records confirmed Fisković’s supposition about the court, and the marks made it possible to reconstruct the dimensions of the stone benches.

The portcullis itself, the judicial rows, and the shops are no longer here. Their sequence remains on the two side walls: the grooves from the lock run vertically, traces of the judicial steps run horizontally, and rougher masonry marks the locations of the former shops.