| Once Senj’s set-piece town square, Cinlica at the eastern end of the Old Town is nowadays a grubby car park and no longer fulfils the central role in civic life it did in the past. Occupying its eastern side is the sixteenth-century Kastel, the Captain of Senj’s residence and the nerve-centre of the Habsburg Empire’s frontier defences. Under nineteenth-century Bishop Mirko Ožegović the building was turned into a boarding school for disadvantaged children. The school was known as the Ozegovicianum, and an inscription bearing that name can still be seen running along the façade today. Converted into residential flats after World War II, the building was returned to the church in 2009 and its long-term future is currently being debated.
In the centre of the Cilnica is the hexagonal fountain erected by Major Kajetan Knezić, the Croatian military engineer responsible for renovating the Karlovac-to-Senj Jozefinska cesta in the 1830s. |