Sea organ

Interesting facts

Beneath the steps lie 35 pipes of different lengths, grouped so that the sea plays seven chords of five notes each.

The harmonies are built on the chords of G major and C6, which alternate from one flight of steps to the next.

The designers kept plastic tubes for the pipework but made the whistles of stainless steel, because heat would warp plastic and change the pitch.

Besides the architect and the acoustician, the hydraulic engineer Vladimir Andročec helped work out how the waves would drive the air.

The organ shared its 2006 European prize with a Dutch project in Zaanstad, chosen from 207 entries from 31 countries.

A chrome ring around the Greeting to the Sun lists the patron saints of the peninsula's churches with their feast days, solar altitude and daylight hours, making it a calendar.

The light show's start and finish times were programmed for fifty years ahead, beginning in 2008.

The planets beside the Greeting to the Sun are sized in proportion to the Sun, though their distances are compressed.

The solar modules generate about 46,500 kilowatt-hours a year, roughly half the energy needed by the waterfront.

Alfred Hitchcock, staying in Zadar in 1964, is said to have called its sunset the most beautiful in the world.

Why it is worth it

At the western tip of Zadar's old town peninsula, broad white stone steps lead down into the Adriatic, and from slits along their top comes a low, shifting music: the sound of the sea itself. The Sea Organ, designed by the architect Nikola Bašić and opened on 15 April 2005, is an instrument played entirely by waves and tides. As the water surges in and out beneath the steps, it drives air through pipes of different diameters, each ending in a tuned whistle, so that every swell produces its own chord.

The organ runs along about 75 metres of the waterfront, built as a sequence of terraced steps. Hidden inside them are polyethylene tubes and a resonating cavity, with stainless steel whistles calculated and tuned by the Heferer organ-building workshop. The acoustician and musician Ivica Stamać arranged the notes into seven sound clusters built on two major chords, drawing on the harmonies of klapa, the traditional Dalmatian a cappella song. The project was part of the rebuilding of the city's new waterfront, which after the bombing of the Second World War had been hastily reconstructed as a monotonous concrete wall. In 2006 it shared the European Prize for Urban Public Space.

A few steps away lies Bašić's second piece for the same promenade, the Greeting to the Sun: a 22-metre circle of 300 layered glass plates set flush with the paving, with solar modules beneath that power a light show after dark, and smaller circles for the planets nearby.

Zadar itself is one of the oldest cities on the Adriatic. It began as a Liburnian settlement in the 9th century BC, became the Roman colony of Iader, and keeps the remains of its Roman forum, the centrally planned church of St Donatus, the largest pre-Romanesque building in Croatia, and Venetian fortifications that form part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 2017.

Getting there

The Sea Organ is on the waterfront promenade of Obala kralja Petra Krešimira IV, about 400 metres from the centre of Zadar's old town. Zadar Airport (ZAD) is about 11 km away.

Sea organ

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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