Dyggve´s excavations in and around Salona in Dalmatia and Jelling in
east Jutland still serve as the crown witnesses of the Christianization
of today´s Croatia and Denmark and are closely bound to the national
identities in both countries. Dyggve´s convictions of the causal priority
of topological, liturgical and other functional elements over the formal
elements of ‘style’ have led him to defend his continuity-thesis, which
has provoked a fruitful debate since its appearance in the 1920s. The
presented paper picked a complementary context between Denmark
and Croatia as a model for questioning of the cultural continuity,
where the comparative investigation of the life-long collaboration
and competition between the two exact contemporaries Ejnar Dyggve
(1887-1961) and Ljubo Karaman (1886-1971) served as a model.