Sponza Palace

Paskoje Milicevic built it between 1516 and 1522, and the facade reads as two periods at once: a Gothic first floor of pointed windows above a Renaissance arcad…Paskoje Milicevic built it between 1516 and 1522, and the facade reads as two periods at once: a Gothic first floor of pointed windows above a Renaissance arcade at street level, with a plain upper storey over both.

It worked as the customs house and the mint, and the inscription in the courtyard warns that the scales weighing goods are the same ones God will weigh the merchant with. The 1667 earthquake flattened most of the street and left this standing, which is why it shows more clearly than anything else what the Republic's civic architecture looked like. It now holds the state archive, whose oldest documents run back to 1022, and a memorial room for the defenders of the 1990s siege.