Tvrdalj Castle

In 1448 Hektor Hektorović was granted permission by the Hvar Governor, the Hvarski Knez, to build on land at the far western edge of Stari Grad, right on the shore of the bay. That is the year the Hektorović family first appears as owner of the Tvrdalj estate, and in time they raised four houses on it. The ground already carried the name Tvrdalj, a word for a fortress or a castle, which implies a fortification on the site before them.

The place had been occupied since ancient times. Remains came to light in 1898 during excavations for the steps of the nearby church of Sv Rocco, and the house was raised on the shore close to where the baths of a Roman country villa had stood; the brackish fish pond at its centre probably formed on the remains of an ancient piscina or harbour work. The literary model for the building was Varro's description of the villa at Casinum in De re rustica, and Petar Hektorović furnished his estate to match it, down to the aviary, the rabbit run and the inscriptions cut into the stone.

Petar Hektorović (1487–1572), the Croatian poet, took over the work on the death of his father Marin and made Tvrdalj his summer residence to his own architectural design. He bought out his relatives' shares in the property by 1540 and began turning it into a country complex with a park around the fish pond, joining defensive and residential architecture in what became a fortified Renaissance villa. It was not his only house on the island, nor even his only house in Stari Grad, but he set it out at length in his will, explaining in architectural detail how the unfinished work was to be continued.

Those were building decades for the town. The Dominican monastery went up in 1482, and noble families across the island treated Old Hvar, as it was then called, as a peaceful haven and raised summer palaces there; in 1553 the Venetian correspondent Giustinian described Stari Grad as having "handsome buildings and a port fit for the largest of ships." Hektorović built directly on the waterfront, which in the sixteenth century lay further inland than it does now, with shallow seawater running up to the entrance so that the house could be reached by boat.

Through the 1520s and 1530s the work went mainly on housing for travellers and the poor. On the eastern side, with its own entrance, stood lodging for travellers and paupers, and a Beguine nun lived in a small cell under the terrace of the loggia. The layout was plain, single-storey dwellings around a courtyard with a fish pond stocked with grey mullet, a dovecote tower above it and a walled garden behind where Hektorović grew herbs and medicinal plants. He said himself that his construction began with the fishes in the pond, standing for Christ, and ended with the doves, standing for the holy spirit.

He set several dozen inscriptions into the walls, in Latin and Croatian with one in Italian, most of them moralising in the humanist manner; the Croatian ones are reckoned among the oldest that survive. The whole complex was dedicated OMNIUM CONDITORI, to the Creator of the World, the words that met visitors arriving at the sea portal. Another read PETRVS HECTOREVS MARINI FILIVS PROPRIO SVMPTV ET INDVSTRIA AD SVVM ET AMICOR. VSVM CONSTRVXIT: Petar Hektorović, son of Marin, built this at his own expense and by his own efforts, for his own and his friends' use. Others record hospitality for travellers (PRO ITINERANNTIBUS) and for the poor (PRO PAUPERIBUS), and over the atrium lavatory he had cut SI TE NOSTI CUR SUPERBIS, know what thou art, then why art thy proud. There was none of the ornamentation or classical statuary of other fashionable noble houses of the time.

Hvar came under attack from the Ottoman Turks through the sixteenth century, and Hektorović, one of the local nobles, undertook to fortify his house so that it could shelter the townspeople. An attack on Stari Grad in 1539 left much of the town burned and ransacked, and Hektorović fled to Italy; he returned in 1541 and set about fortifying Tvrdalj to his own ideas with the help of local masters, which shows in the simple, rustic look of the complex. Before that only the altana on the north wall had been built. He gave the house a long closed façade towards the sea against attack and a high wall around the whole enclosure, with the altana crowned by merlons; a two-storey retirata went up at the north-east corner, and a ravelin was planned for the south-east and a kaštel for the south-west.

In 1571 Stari Grad was attacked again and Tvrdalj was set on fire by the Turks. The ravelin and the kaštel were left unfinished and other parts of the house were badly damaged. Hektorović died the following year.

The damaged Tvrdalj was divided between his relatives and stood in a ruinous state. The provisions of his will governed what was done to it and improvements followed gradually, but serious repair began only at the end of the seventeenth century and the start of the eighteenth.

In 1834 the Venetian laws that had protected the building provisions of Hektorović's will lapsed, and the house underwent heavy construction. The south wall of the complex was taken down, the ravelin was remodelled, vaults were built around the fish pond, a second storey was raised over the ranges and new two-storey houses went up, one of them at the north-east corner. The bay in front of Tvrdalj was filled in as part of the harbour improvements; the square that lies in front of the house today did not exist before the nineteenth century. In 1901 the eastern wall of the ravelin was demolished and a house built over the vault and the cistern, which still form part of the entrance on that side.