Youth Park

Brief information

Park mladezi looks like a stadium with an unfinished biography: construction began for the Split football club in the late 1940s, the club has played here since 1955, but the arena was never fully completed. A partial renovation before the 1979 Mediterranean Games did not turn it into a finished showpiece, but it did leave an important contrast between a permanent home arena and a structure that developed in fits and starts.

It is the second-largest stadium in Split after Poljud, but what is more interesting is not its scale, but its mix of functions. Running tracks are laid around the football pitch and are used mainly by the Split Athletics Club. The current name appeared only in the 1990s; earlier, the arena and the surrounding park were called Park skojevaca, and the district is known as Turska kula, the “Turkish tower.” The old names recall that the stadium is embedded not only in the sporting memory, but also in the urban memory of the district.

What to notice right away

It makes sense to look at Park mladezi as a composite sports ground, not only as a football pitch. The first layer is the running tracks around the grass: they immediately show why the arena serves more than one club and more than one sport. The second layer is the floodlights. They were taken from the Stari plac stadium after Hajduk moved to Poljud and the old arena was partially dismantled, so the lighting equipment here is linked to another venue in the city.

Next to the main field, the original description highlights a training field. It has its own stand, built in 2006, and this adds a later independent element to the old, unfinished arena. You can compare three things: the main field with its tracks, the transferred floodlights, and the separate stand of the training field. Together they show the stadium as a place that was not built once “from scratch to completion,” but assembled and updated according to the needs of clubs and the city.