Rector’s Palace, Ethnographic Museum, Synagogue (Dubrovnik)

If you read the immediately preceding journal entry, you know that I’m trying out posting twice a day here, rather than once as I did up to this point in my journal. This is the afternoon post. In it, I write about my visits to the Rector’s Palace, the Ethnographic Museum in the Rupe Granary, and Dubrovnik’s synagogue and its museum.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Rector’s Palace

For some period, a period that ended in 1808, Dubrovnik was an aristocratic republic unto itself. I’m not a student of such things, but I imagine that aristocratic republics were fabulous forms of government. For the aristocrats. For the common folk? I doubt it.

Be that as it may, during its aristocratic republic days, the Rector’s Palace served as the seat of political power.

The palace now serves as a museum. None of the original furniture is there because the palace was plundered at least twice, most recently by Napoleon. Well, you know what they say. To the Victor go the spoils. To the Napoleon too, apparently. Although, I might have the capitalization wrong in the original saying. And the use of the definite article might be wrong in my follow-on sentence. Never mind. Spoils go places against their original owners’ wishes is the point here.

In addition to walking around the palace, I looked at the paintings on the walls, some statues stationed on the floors, and various period pieces.

I also ducked my head and went through low-clearance doors into the couple of jail cells in the palace. Jail cells? Of course. What’s a palace without jail cells? A better palace, I’d say. But maybe that’s just me.

Two of the statues are roughly mirror-image bronze human figures holding hammers. The text that accompanies them says they used to ring the bell on the old town clock. It’s believed that the statues were forged in 1478. The clock mechanism from the old town clock sits in another room of the Rector’s Palace.

Ethnographic Museum

The Rupe Granary, no longer a granary, now contains Dubrovnik’s Ethnographic Museum.

The museum’s multiple levels exhibit traditional ethnic costumes, farm implements, children’s toys, and other folk stuff from the last couple of centuries. Regular readers of this journal know how much I love those sorts of museums. Namely, not much. But it is small enough to be neither overwhelming nor excessively tedious.

Having said that, if you enjoy that sort of thing you may love the Ethnographic Museum. It’s nicely laid out and presented.

The building itself is quite impressive with its stone walls and dark wood ceilings. It’s worth going in just to take a look at that. And, it’s free with the Dubrovnik Pass I mentioned in this morning’s post. So, I spent only time there, not money. And, I’m retired. My time is cheap.

The tour book I use in Croatia recommends looking down through the heavy grates on the floor to see 15 cavernous underground former grain storage compartments. That posed just one problem. The ground level of the museum was closed off when I was there. It looked like they cleared out one set of exhibits and were getting ready to install new ones.

I assume the grates above the underground storage areas are on that ground floor. I mean, really? How could they be on an upper floor? The point is, I didn’t see any underground storage compartments, cavernous or otherwise. Because, of course, I didn’t. They probably closed them off just for me. Tourist attractions often do that to me.

On the other hand, for all I know, maybe they closed off the ground floor because people kept crashing through the grates to their deaths in the cavernous grain storage compartments. Probably not, but, if so, I thank them for closing the area off before I got there.

Dubrovnik Synagogue and Museum

I read that Dubrovnik’s synagogue contains Croatia’s only Jewish museum. To be honest, I don’t know if it’s true that it’s the only one, but it does contain a Jewish museum. I thought I should pay homage to my tribe. So I went.

The museum is in two small rooms. It exhibits Torah scrolls, Torah mantles, and Torah crowns. There is also a kiddish cup and a few other pieces of Judaica that I’ve since forgotten.

One other thing I did remember, although I’d hardly call it Judaica, dated from 1941. It was a yellow armband with a Magen David printed on it. Yes, Dubrovnik too.

The synagogue itself is small. I doubt it can hold more than a few dozen people in the pews, if that, and not many more standing. It may be small, but it packs a lot of attractiveness into that small space.

The interior is done in baroque style. I know that because I read that. What the heck do I know about baroqueness?

The few pews are constructed of dark, rich wood. The floors are also wood. A swooping red curtain partially drapes the windows behind the Torah ark at the front of the shul. The ark is also attractively decorated. Lamps and chandeliers hang from the ceiling.

On the way out, I asked the ticket seller if the synagogue is still used today. She said, “Yes, but only for special occasions like weddings and bar mitzvahs. It’s not used regularly.”

She didn’t mention the High Holidays as one of those special occasions. I guess few, if any, religious Jews reside in Dubrovnik. Being an atheist Jew who never goes to synagogue for services, I can’t unhypocritically lament that much. But, still.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my two-part day. Regardless of whether tomorrow will be one part or two parts (I’m not sure which yet), tomorrow is another day. As they say, stay tuned.