Statue of Petar Zoranić

On St Chrysogonus’ square is a statue of a man with rather muscular legs. This is Petar Zoranić, the writer of the first novel in Croatian. Born in Zadar, he was the son of a family of nobles from Nin. The beauty of the surrounding mountains and the sea was his inspiration and his theme in Planine (“Mountains”), written in 1536, a pastoral romance and a product of the Renaissance in Zadar at that time – a time when the city was under siege by the Turks, but art and culture prospered within.