Zadar

Zadar began in the 9th century BC as a Liburnian settlement on a small stone islet joined to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, and by the 7th century BC it was trading with Phoenicians, Etruscans and Greeks. Rome made Iader a municipium in 59 BC and, after the town backed Caesar in the civil war, a colony in 48 BC. It gained a street grid, baths, a forum and an aqueduct of about 40 km from Lake Vrana. When Salona was destroyed in the 7th century, Zadar became the seat of Byzantine Dalmatia, and it became a naval power to rival Venice.

That rivalry shaped its medieval story. Zadar swore allegiance to Venice in 998, rebelled again and again, and turned to the Hungarian crown in 1183. In 1202 the Venetians diverted the Fourth Crusade to besiege and plunder the city. Louis I of Hungary took it in 1357, but in 1409 Ladislaus of Naples sold Zadar and his claim to Dalmatia to Venice for 100,000 ducats. As the capital of Venetian Dalmatia facing the Ottomans, it became the largest fortified city in the region, and in 1396 the Dominicans founded the university.

After Venice fell, Zadar was Austrian, briefly French, then Austrian again, serving as capital of the Kingdom of Dalmatia until 1918. The Treaty of Rapallo gave it to Italy in 1920 as the enclave of Zara. Allied bombing from November 1943 to October 1944 destroyed about 80 per cent of its buildings — it has been called the "Dresden of the Adriatic" — and most of its Italian population left after the war. The city was shelled again from 1991, and its land link with the rest of Croatia was restored in 1993.

Zadar was a centre of the Renaissance on the Adriatic. The sculptor Giorgio da Sebenico was born here, and in the 15th and 16th centuries the city produced both Italian humanists and Croatian writers: Petar Zoranić wrote Planine, the first Croatian novel. Under French rule it printed the first Dalmatian newspaper, in Italian and Croatian, the first time Croatian appeared in a newspaper. That mixed inheritance still shows in the place names and in a small Italian community of a few hundred people.

The modern city is known as much for two pieces of contemporary design as for its churches: Nikola Bašić's Sea Organ and Monument to the Sun on the western tip of the peninsula, where crowds gather for the sunset. Music is part of the summer calendar, from the concerts in St Donatus, held since 1961, to an international choirs competition. A small rowing-boat ferry has crossed the harbour for some 800 years.

Sport is a local passion. KK Zadar is one of Croatia's best-known basketball clubs and fills the Krešimir Ćosić Hall, and the city is the hometown of the footballer Luka Modrić, made an honorary citizen in 2019. Faith is visible too, as the seat of an archdiocese, and St Chrysogonus is the city's patron saint. Like the rest of the coast, Zadar runs on a relaxed rhythm, and the walk along the seafront at dusk is a fixture of the day.

Zadar had 70,779 residents at the 2021 census, making it the fifth-largest city in Croatia and the second-largest in Dalmatia; ethnic Croats make up about 95 per cent. Most people live outside the peninsula, in districts such as Arbanasi, Voštarnica, Smiljevac, Bokanjac, Borik and Puntamika, while the old town is increasingly given over to visitors in summer.

The economy rests on tourism alongside seaborne trade, fish farming and food production. The shipping company Tankerska plovidba, the food company Cromaris and the maraschino maker Maraska are based here, and the University of Zadar, refounded as an independent university in 2003, has more than 6,000 students. The airport at Zemunik has grown quickly on low-cost flights, and the port of Gaženica handles ferries to the islands and Italy.

The day starts with coffee on a terrace and slows in the afternoon heat before the evening walk along the seafront. Many families have ties to the islands of the archipelago, which ferries serve daily. Since 2020 the city has had no passenger railway, so buses and cars carry almost everyone. Šime Erlić was elected mayor in 2025.

Zadar's own contribution to the table is maraschino, the liqueur distilled from slightly sour marasca cherries, which grow on the Ravni Kotari farmland north-east of the city. Distilling here dates back centuries; in 1759 the Venetian merchant Francesco Drioli began industrial production in what was then Zara, and his factory held royal warrants from the courts of Austria, Great Britain and Italy before closing in 1980. Maraska still makes maraschino in the city today.

The rest of the menu is Dalmatian. Fish is grilled, chard, blitva, is one of the commonest ingredients of Dalmatian cooking, and brudet, a stew of several kinds of fish, is eaten with polenta. Pag cheese, the hard sheep's milk cheese of the island to the north, is served with pršut, the smoked, dry-cured ham of Dalmatia. Black risotto, a seafood dish, and pašticada, beef braised in sweet wine and prunes, are Dalmatian staples on konoba menus.

Coffee culture fills the terraces of Kalelarga and the seafront. Wine comes from across Dalmatia, and at the end of a meal a glass of maraschino or a herb brandy is a local way to finish.