Upon passing below the City Tower, a walk-through tower of the former main city gate and the entrance to the medieval Rijeka from the coast, you will arrive in the Old Town of Rijeka. The main city market – Placa was once located in the area of today’s Kobler Square, at the time a much smaller and narrower surface area of the communal centre of the medieval walled town. Some more accurate historical accounts of Rijeka depict it as a vertically elongated surface area bordered by the City Tower and the Council to the north and south and a series of houses to the east and west.
To the north, Rijeka was dominated by a patrician’s castle, to the east there was the main church of the common people with a cemetery, to the west a spacious priests’ enclosure and to the south, close to the dock and the market on the seashore below the city walls, there was the secular heart of the City. There, the citizens of Rijeka would meet to listen to the proclamations of the town crier, make deals, and buy and sell in the open market or in stores situated in the ground floors of houses. Only traces of these houses remain, several old walls integrated into more modern buildings, a Baroque lintel with the former owner’s coat of arms and an arched underground granary. Not so long ago there was a “green market” here, where fruit and vegetables were sold.
