Culture
Zadar, the sea organ and the sunset Hitchcock admired
On the waterfront at Zadar the sea plays an organ, and beside it a circle of glass stores the sun and gives it back after dark. Alfred Hitchcock is said to have called the sunset here the most beautiful in the world, and the town has never let anyone forget it.
By Walter Pellow2 November 20265 min read
At the western tip of Zadar's old town, where the stone promenade meets the Adriatic, there is a long flight of white marble steps running down into the water. Sit on them and you will hear something that sounds like a ship's horn heard from a great distance, or a whale singing in its sleep. The notes rise and fall with the waves, never quite repeating. The sea is playing an organ.
The Sea Organ was designed by the Croatian architect Nikola Bašić and opened in April 2005. Beneath the steps are thirty-five pipes of different lengths, and as the waves push into openings below the waterline, they drive air through the pipes and out of slots in the stone. The result is music without a composer, varying with the swell and the wind and the passing wakes of boats. On a calm day it murmurs; when the sea is up it can be surprisingly loud.
A circle that keeps the sun
A few steps away, set into the promenade, is a second work by Bašić, completed in 2008 and called the Greeting to the Sun. It is a great circle of three hundred glass plates, laid flush with the paving, which gather sunlight through the day. After dark the circle lights up in shifting patterns of colour, and on summer evenings it fills with children running across it and adults pretending not to want to.
Between them, the two installations have made this corner of the waterfront the place the town gathers. In the evening the steps fill with people who have come for one thing, and it is the sunset.
The sunset
Alfred Hitchcock is said to have stayed in Zadar in 1964 and to have declared the sunset here the most beautiful in the world, more beautiful even than the one at Key West. Nobody seems to have a recording of him saying it, and the remark is repeated far more often than it is sourced. But the town has adopted it with great enthusiasm, and you can see why. Zadar faces west across a channel scattered with islands, and in the evening the sun goes down behind them, the water turns from silver to gold to a deep rose, and the Sea Organ keeps playing underneath.
The remark is repeated far more often than it is sourced, but the town has adopted it with great enthusiasm.
Whether it is the most beautiful sunset in the world is a question nobody can answer. It is certainly a very good one, and the setting, a stone promenade, a sea that sings and a circle of glass that lights up as the sky darkens, is like nowhere else.
An older Zadar
Behind the waterfront is a town much older than its installations. Zadar was a Roman city, and its forum, laid out between the first century BC and the third century AD, lies open in the middle of the old town. Beside it stands the Church of St Donatus, a round church built in the ninth century, partly from stone taken from the forum itself. Pieces of the forum are built into its foundations. It is tall and bare and circular, and it has stood there for well over a thousand years.
Zadar is also the home of maraschino, a cherry liqueur made in the town for centuries and once prized at the royal tables of Europe. A small glass of it, sipped on the steps of the Sea Organ while the sun goes down, is about as Zadar as an evening can get.
Holidays that visit Zadar
Three holidays in the catalogue include Zadar.
Explore Worldwide's seven-night Walks and Coastal Towns of Croatia combines the mountains with the coast. Its places include Zagreb and the Medvednica mountain, the Plitvice Lakes National Park, Baske Ostarije and the Velebit mountain range, Karlobag, Starigrad and the Paklenica Gorge, Zadar, and then Krka National Park, Visovac island and Split. It has departures in April, May, June and September.
Just You's seven-night Croatian Island Explorer has Krka National Park, Šibenik and Zadar among its places, then Primosten, the islands of Hvar and Brač, with Stari Grad and Milna, and Trogir and Split.
Travelsphere's ten-night Croatia Uncovered also includes Zadar, alongside Trogir, Krka National Park, Sibenik, Korcula, Dubrovnik, Mljet, Hvar, Milna and Split.
If you have one evening in Zadar, spend it on the waterfront. Arrive before sunset, find a place on the steps, and let the sea and the sun do the work.
By Walter Pellow, the name Atlas & Passage’s editorial team writes under. Prices and dates in the trips below come from the operators and can change.
