Have you heard of the Sea Organ? Or perhaps seen the Greeting to the Sun? These are incredibly interesting artistic, technical, and tourist attractions located on the main waterfront of the coastal city of Zadar.
If you are a sea lover, you probably already know Zadar. A city over three thousand years old, known for its bell towers, as a port city, and the capital of the Zadar County, rich in cultural and historical heritage.
However, you may not have heard that Zadar is also famous for its modern attractions, such as the technological-artistic sound installation ‘Sea Organ’ and its extension ‘Greeting to the Sun,’ which at night creates light effects in rhythm with the sea waves.
Sea Organ
The Sea Organ in Zadar is a unique architectural achievement, an interesting and original blend of architecture and music, which has become a modern icon of the city. Unlike traditional organs powered by bellows or air pumps, the sound of these organs is created by the energy of the sea, i.e., waves and tides.
Sea waves pass through musical pipes installed under the sea, creating an incredible sound, known as “sea music,” which fills the entire promenade with its melody.
The stone steps extend seventy meters along the coast, divided into seven ten-meter sections, under which 35 pipes of various lengths, diameters, and angles are installed perpendicularly to the shore at the lowest sea level, rising at an incline and ending in a service corridor.
The air pushed by the waves from a wider to a narrower profile accelerates, creating sound in the whistles placed in the corridor under the promenade, producing melodies that escape through mystical openings in the stone. The instrument has seven registers with five selected tones derived from the pattern of Dalmatian choral singing.
As the energy of the sea is unpredictable, with countless changes in tides, wave sizes, strengths, and directions, the eternal concert of the Sea Organ is unique in its endless musical variations, authored and interpreted by nature itself.
The Sea Organ is located on the western part of the Zadar waterfront, close to the Greeting to the Sun installation.
Greeting to the Sun
The Greeting to the Sun consists of three hundred multilayered glass panels, laid at the same level parallel to the stone-paved promenade, forming a 22-meter diameter circle. It is designed as a spacious installation in the form of an amphitheater, around which a stylized representation of all the planets of the Solar System and their orbits is displayed on stone blocks.
Beneath the glass panels are photovoltaic solar modules, through which symbolic communication with nature takes place, aiming to facilitate interaction—there with sound, and here with light.
In the chromed frame surrounding the photovoltaic modules, the names of Zadar’s saints are inscribed. Additionally, the deviation of the Sun north or south from the equator, the Sun’s height, and the duration of sunlight are marked, making the installation a kind of calendar.
The author of both attractions is Croatian engineer Nikola Bašić, who in May 2006 received the European Prize for Urban Public Space for the Sea Organ project in Zadar.