At the dawing of this twenty four centuries old town, at the time of ninety ninth Olypic Games, when ''the Archon Diotrephes resided in Athenas, and the consuls Lucius Valerius and Aulus Manilius resided in Rome, the Greeks sailed in 384/385 BC from the island Paros and erected on the ruins of the Illyrian settlement the town of Pharos fortified by the Cyclopean walls ...

The army commander Demetrius, the cunning tyrant and the favourite of the Illyrian Queen Teute, ruled the powerful Pharos in the third century. His unquenchable hunger for power dertermined the destiny of the flourishing town. Demetrius insolently affronted Rome, the consequence being the destruction of Pharos in 219 BC by Roman consul Emilius Paulus ...

The town was resurrected as the Roman town of Pharia. The mosaics from the first centuries after Christ some of them dug out and some stilla hidden under the paved streets, recall the times when Starogradsko polje /the fields of the Old Town/ - the Ager of Pharos, green with vineyards since the times of the Greek settlers was colonised by the Roman veterans who raised their villae there. The townspeople from Pharos passed along the stone roads, old even at that time, which regulary intersected the Field during the eternal vintage festivities in September. There, wine had always been a precious joy and reward ...

There are numerous stops on the journey through time evoked by Stari Grad. The names of town: Pharos, Pharia, Slavic Huarra, then in the late Middle Ages Civitas vetus, finally blossoming into Cittavecchia /Stari Grad/, the town of active tradesmen and members of the shipping trade ...

However, the true festivity of its millennium-long existance is revealed on entering the mythical fortifield place of Tvrdalj, raised by the poet, the nobleman Petar Hektorović who was troughout his life dedicated to it. It contained everything a sixteenth century sage needed: seclusion, however, seclusion that lends itself to the joy of companionship in the shady gardens, beside the fish-pond and the dovecote, protected by the thick walls of the fortress. In Tvrdalj, under the shady cloister round the fish-pond, in the poet's house who contemplated the eternity even today one can hearken the bills of ephemerality of this world ...