Luckily I ran into a lovely song about main street in old town of Dubrovnik – Stradun. The author of the song is Luko Paljetak, a famous poet from Dubrovnik.
That’s not a mere street but a paternoster
of everyday life, our anteroom, a hall
of Versailles, a place where you can walk and ball,
according to the tune and to yourself, impostor.
It awoke in me the desire for the story:
Start of fiction.
Once upon a time, when Dubrovnik was not surrounded with the large city walls and when construction of houses has just begun, the main street wasn’t there, but the sea was – a tricky natural protection. There, on the coastline, at the night fairies came to socialize and dance in the shallow. As the morning dawned and people of Dubrovnik awoke fairies would disappear. Only few of them caught them dancing, but they would soon be declared insane when they talked about them. As Dubrovnik expanded, people of Dubrovnik, not knowing and not believing, poured that part of the sea and made themselves the main street in town, called Placa (Stradun). Since then, fairies where never seen again, but everyone will tell you – when you walk through Stradun, it feels like you are dancing.
End of fiction.
It was built at the end of the 11th century by filling in the sea passage between the mainland and the small island of Lava. Since the 13th century, the main sewage collector has run under Placa. In 1486 it was paved with stone, and its present look is from the time after the earthquake of 1667. It is around 300 meters long. The name Placa comes form the Greek word platea meaning street. The Venetians vulgarly called it Stradun, an offensive term used for a large street.
