The door of Giorgio's house is beyond that of the sacristan, in a narrow street, the Contrada S. Gregorio. To reach it, one leaves the piazza by a slope beyond the Loggia, the ancient palace of the council of the Nobles, a building of 1522, now a social club. The slope affords a view of the enclosure in which the "vere" of the communal wells still remain, four circular well-heads, with the symbols of the Evangelists and coats of arms in roundels upon them, surrounded by cable mouldings, four on each. Sebenico now has a fine water-supply brought from the Kerka, twelve miles away, and they are no longer in use. The aqueduct—the first constructed in Dalmatia in modern times—is named the Lott-Brunnen, in commemoration of the clever engineer who designed it.
Near the cathedral is the little church of S. Barbara; the bell-turret on the wall is used as its campanile. In the north wall is an ogee-headed window, deeply splayed and with pretty tracery; below it a little shrine to the Virgin is set most oddly, with an arch projecting up into the window space. A little higher up the street is the fine Venetian door illustrated a few pages back, with columns and pinnacles, and returning wall with elaborately shaped battlements. At the church of S. Giovanni Battista is a fine external stair of fourteenth-century Venetian type, a double flight returning on itself, with a landing at the change of direction. The balustrade is continued round the side of the church and the tower, but with square unmoulded shafts in place of the colonnettes. The trefoiled heads are cut in the rail with the carved spandrils between. There are many pieces of sculpture of the Venetian period, windows, balconies, &c., in the walls here and there, and wheel-windows occur with quatrefoils filling the heads of the spaces next the circumference.
BELFRY OF GREEK CHURCH, SEBENICO
COSTUME OF SEBENICO
There are also a few pictures to be seen. In the cathedral is an Andrea Schiavone (who died here in 1582), "The Adoration of the Three Kings." In S. Domenico alla Marina there are said to be fine Renaissance altars, and pictures by Lorenzo Lotto, Palma Giovane, and Marco Vecellio. We did not see them, as, on the occasion of both our visits to Sebenico, the church was being restored or rebuilt. The interior of S. Francesco is harmonious. It was in the archives of this convent that Mgr. Bulić discovered a gradual written on parchment of the ninth or tenth century, which had been brought from S. Maria di Bribir in 1527.
The Greek church has a very interesting belfry of late Renaissance style in the gable; two arches with projecting semicircular pierced balustrades for the ringers, and the bells (which are clappered) hanging in the free space beneath the arch above. A third bell is in a higher arch without the balustrading. The Greek Christians celebrate the Church festivals with processions about the town, treated with great respect by their Roman Catholic fellow-citizens, of which one held on the Assumption may be described as typical. Boys and girls with garlands led the way, followed by women with coloured aprons and voluminous draperies. Then came a band in gay uniforms and plumed head-gear, then priests in vestments of cloth of gold, swinging silver censers, or bearing holy pictures; they were big men of fine appearance, with religious earnestness in their faces. In the middle, under a silken canopy with gold fringes, a higher ecclesiastic walked, a venerable figure, with long silver hair and beard, bearing the most holy object and looking like a high-priest, surrounded as he was with clouds of incense. After the priests came a long line of men in country costume, powerful figures with flashing eyes, and faces full of character. They held themselves upright like soldiers, and bore large white tapers fastened four together. The sides of the narrow streets were lined with Roman Catholics who looked on with sympathetic interest at the religious ceremonies of their fellow-citizens of a different creed, an example which might be commended to sects nearer home.
The people are hospitable, and very generous, but proud, and, like the Spaniards, easily moved both to acts of violence and kindness. There is no nobility, the patrician families being either extinct or impoverished, partly owing to a severe epidemic of smallpox which smote the town in 1872. The men wear a ridiculous small red cap, like that worn at Zara, but smaller, often requiring an elastic round the back of the head to keep it on, and waistcoats and coats ornamented with large silver buttons of filigree work (older examples of which are works of art, but the modern mere articles of commerce). The collar is curious, with a facing of red or black worsted, apparently intended to imitate fur (shown in the drawing of the costume). The trousers are dark blue, with a slit towards the ankle, laced up with silver wire, and strong shoes are worn with turned-up toes covered with hide lacings. The women have a white head-dress, a cloth twisted round and fastened to the hair in the manner of that worn at Lussin Piccolo. One of the waiters at the restaurant who came from Spalato, but whose side-whiskers stamped him as an Austrian, told us he had been in Glasgow and other British towns—a rather unusual thing with the men of his class, though many of the sailors are acquainted with British ports. The dustmen reminded one of the days of one's childhood when in England; they went round ringing a bell and calling "Dust-ooh!" At the sound all kinds of refuse were brought out to the cart, which went slowly along the narrow street.
Sebenico was the birthplace of the celebrated Nicolò Tommaseo, to whom a statue has been erected in the public garden below the piazza, where Sanmichele's gate stands. He was born in 1802, and was philologist, philosopher, historian, poet, novelist, critic, psychologist, statist, politician, and orator, leaving behind him, when he died in 1874, some two hundred works. In its time of prosperity the city owned several islands, of which Zlarin is the most populous and the richest.