The address a guest types into the navigation reads Ul. Antuna Kuzmanića 3. A few minutes' walk from here Radunica begins, the street this whole part of town is remembered by. Lučac is an old Split suburb outside the walls of Diocletian's Palace, and Radunica was its central street.
The name Radunica comes from nobody famous. Radun is an old Illyrian word for a spring of water — the street is named after the very thing that made people stop here.
They stopped about five hundred years ago. The Split tourist board records that old Split families gathered around Radunica as they arrived from the Republic of Poljica, a peasant self-governing district in the hills above the city. They were farm workers and fishermen — people who lived off the land and the sea, not off the Palace.
Houses went up wall to wall, and the lanes branching off Radunica took the names of the families who lived in them: Kuzmanića, Ninčevića, Kuzmića. These are not the names of commanders or officials but of neighbours. Our street is one of those lanes.
The best-known Split man of that surname is Ante Kuzmanić, born in Split in 1807. He was a physician, publicist and linguist; in 1844 he launched the weekly Zora dalmatinska in Zadar, and in 1851 Pravdonoša, the first legal paper in the Croatian language. Whether the street is named after him or after the family as a whole we would not claim — what is recorded is only that the lanes off Radunica carry the names of old Split families.
The name did not stay only on the street sign. Set above the entrance to our house is a stone carved with a cross, the name Jure Kuzman and the year 1881. It is the oldest date we have for the house — written not on paper but in stone.
In the last week of June, for the feast of St Peter, Radunica holds the Days of Radunica. It is a neighbourhood festival by the quarter and for the quarter — the one occasion in the year when you see how much this part of town is still a village inside a city.
For a guest all of this means one thing: you are not sleeping in a tourist zone but in a quarter older than tourism. Diocletian's Palace is three hundred metres away, and Radunica a few minutes on foot.