Klis and Dalmatia's Ottoman heritage

While the Roman and Venetian history of Dalmatia is well known, less is said about the, largely effaced, Ottoman heritage. The Ottoman Empire reached the Dalmatian coast at Neum (now part of Bosnia and Herzegovina), where a thin strip of land separated the Dubrovnik Republic to the south from Venetian territory to the north. At the Empire’s height, in the 16th and 17th centuries, its territory stretched up and down the Dalmatian hinterland, within sight of the sea in places. Just a few kilometres inland from Split is the fortress of Klis, for centuries a vital strategic point controlling the pass from the interior to the sea.

Klis

The Scottish architect Robert Adam, who visited Split in 1757, and was responsible for some very important drawings of Diocletian’s palace, described the fortifications at Klis, and wrote about their strategic value. His visit coincided with the start of the Seven Year’s War, and he was suspected of being a British spy. Travelling through Dalmatia almost a hundred years later, the renowned English Egyptologist J. Gardner Wilkinson also described the strategic importance of Klis.

Looking up at Klis from Solin, now an outer suburb of Split, it is easy to see its significance. The fortress sits atop a hill standing in a gap between the mountains of the Dinaric range that blocks off the coast from the interior. In the days before highways and tunnels, control of Klis was the key to Split and the whole of Dalmatia. It had been held by Romans, Croats, Hungarians and Venetians, and in 1537 it fell to the Turks, in the long succession of wars that pitted Venice and its Dalmatian subjects against the Ottoman Empire.

Apart from a brief interlude in 1596, when a force from Split surprised the Turks and held the fortress for a few weeks, Klis was under Ottoman control for over a century, until a Venetian army recaptured it in 1648. And that was the end of the Turks. The mosque they had built inside the fortress was converted into a church, dedicated to St. Vitus. The call of the muezzin, which for over a century had echoed in the rocky hills of this now most Catholic country, would be heard no more. Yet a small trace of the Ottoman period remains in the name of the main square of the small town of Klis, below the fortress, ‘Megdan’, derived from the Turkish word ‘meydan’.

The Venetians enlarged the fortress, which they held until their empire was rubbed out by the French in 1797. The importance of the site continued even until the Second World War, when it was occupied by the Germans and bombed by the Allies.