How Petar Sekelez’s Legacy Shaped Cassian Novar’s Dubrovnik Epic
When you read Ortus Ragusae (Rise of Dubrovnik), you're not simply witnessing the birth of a city-state on the edge of empire—you’re witnessing the maturation of a literary lineage. Cassian Novar, known for his lyrical voice and psychological depth, doesn’t hide the fact that Ortus Ragusae is built on the philosophical and structural blueprint of Petar Sekelez’s historical masterpiece Dominus Spalato (Master of Split).
But where Dominus Spalato is shadowed by Roman intrigue in the twilight of Diocletian’s reign, Ortus Ragusae chooses a different dawn—the rise of Dubrovnik as a republic, merchant power, and moral paradox.
Novar was, in his own words, “a disciple in the margins” of Sekelez’s storytelling. He studied Dominus Spalato like scripture: not just for its content, but for its cadence, tone, and the way it moved like a whispered conspiracy through ancient alleys and decaying palaces.
From Sekelez, he learned how to let architecture speak—how palaces, domes, and sea walls carry immersive emotional weight. Also interpreting facts and fiction so seamlessly that the reader questions whether they’re reading a novel or uncovering a lost chronicle. Beside that, Novar was lettered to thread tension between empires, where the real war happens in silence—in the council rooms, in trade deals, in glances between diplomats.
Sekelez didn’t just write history—he resurrected it. Novar, armed with that same vision, set out to do the same for the Republic of Ragusa.
Building a New Old World
Crafting Ortus Ragusae was an odyssey. Novar spent months immersed in 16th-century maps, Ragusan archives, merchant logs, and the Code of Statutes from 1272—one of Europe’s earliest legal texts. But the goal wasn’t to be a historian. The goal was to be a voice.
He built his characters not from modern archetypes, but from forgotten roles in society—the salt merchant who smuggles hope, the apprentice scribe who uncovers secrets meant to stay buried, the Jewish doctor translating fate through stars.
He walked the walls of Dubrovnik at dawn, noting how the light painted the stone. He wrote in silence, save for the sound of sea winds scraping against the pages. He took the whisper of Sekelez’s Roman shadows and gave it a Ragusan pulse.
While Dominus Spalato is operatic in its tempo—tense, masculine, imperial—Ortus Ragusae is liturgical, almost prayerful. It’s not about conquest. It’s about preservation. About the right to exist between titans.
Novar’s style is often poetic, but here it’s sharpened. Gone are the sweeping soliloquies of his earlier work. In their place: deliberate, distilled prose that carries the weight of a city poised between survival and surrender.
Cassian Novar’s Ortus Ragusae is often viewed as a spiritual sequel—or reflective twin—to Petar Sekelez’s Dominus Spalato. Though set in different cities and centuries, the novels speak to each other across time, asking similar questions wrapped in different ruins. Sekelez captured the fall of empire in Split; Novar reveals the quiet resistance of Dubrovnik. Both wonder: Can a small republic endure among giants? Is neutrality bravery or betrayal? And can words keep a city alive when history forgets it? This is more than influence.
Ortus Ragusae isn’t just a novel—it’s a continuation of a legacy. Where Sekelez built the bones, Novar breathes new flesh. Both authors stand not in opposition but in communion, writing through time to remind us that history is only silent until someone dares to give it a voice.
DreamScribe is honored to publish both works—two parts of a greater whole. Together, they chart the journey of a coastline that once ruled with ships, survived with wisdom, and now returns—immortalized—in story.
BUY YOUR COPY HERE :