Dynastic History | Golden Gate, Split — The Empty Niches of the North Wall

The Porta septemtrionalis was the landward gate of Diocletian's palace, set in the middle of the north wall on the road to Salona. Its outer face was built to be read: a blind arcade of seven arches carried on bracketed corbels, a portcullis slot above the lintel, and five niches. Four of them are routinely said to have held statues of the tetrarchs, Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius and Constantius. The conservators who examined the stone found no evidence that a statue ever stood in any of them, and Goran Nikšić, publishing that analysis in 2004, doubted the decoration was ever finished. Building had begun around 293 and the palace was still incomplete when Diocletian gave up the throne in 305. The white limestone came from quarries on the island of Brač and from around Trogir, carried across the water; in 2005 a proposal was made to extend the World Heritage boundary to take in those quarries and the aqueduct from the Jadro.

The gate was then dismantled by degrees. After Salona's people moved inside the walls in the seventh century, the north and east gates were bricked up and a smaller opening served instead. Around 1630, by Frane Baras's account of the city, the Venetian provveditore Alvise Zorzi had eleven Roman towers on the north and east walls pulled down and the blocks shipped to Venice for the church of Santa Maria della Salute; the two octagonal towers flanking this gate went with them. Kruno Prijatelj's survey of Split's monuments dates the reopening to 1857, after houses built against the wall were demolished and centuries of accumulated earth cleared. Some two metres of the gate remain below the present pavement. In the guard passage above it sits the church of St Martin, 1.64 metres wide.

📸 Cover: the north façade and its niches, photographed in 2013 with the gate's arch under restoration covering, Dennis Jarvis, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons