Salona Audio Guide

Welcome to Salona, the largest archaeological park in Croatia. This was the capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia, one of the great cities of the late Roman Empire, with roughly sixty thousand inhabitants. Its ruins spread across the fields of Solin, just inland from Split. The city was founded in the third century BC and destroyed in the seventh, so what lies around the villa covers nine centuries of life. The stone building itself is Tusculum, raised in 1898 and restored in 2008. It owes its existence to don Frane Bulić, a priest who became the pioneer of archaeology here. In the late nineteenth century he led the first major excavations, above all of the early Christian basilicas and cemeteries. In 1894 Solin hosted the First International Congress of Early Christian Archaeology, and four years later Bulić had this memorial collection and workspace built for the Archaeological Museum. The ancient sarcophagus and carved stones set out in front of it were among the finds his digs brought to light.

Photo: SchiDD · CC BY-SA 4.0

Under this vine pergola, the excavators of Salona set up a garden of gathered stone: old columns, a stone table with stools beside it, and carved fragments arranged on the grass. It is a quiet place, but the stones carry a written record. Many inscriptions in both Latin and Greek have been found inside the city walls, and more in the cemeteries outside them. The two languages together show a population drawn from more than one world, living in a city fully woven into the Roman Empire. The inscriptions also speak of money: they record the families wealthy enough to commission cut stone for their dead. That prosperity is the reason so much of Salona survived to be gathered up at all.

Photo: Bieniecki Piotr · CC BY-SA 4.0

Roman law forbade burying the dead inside a city. So the people of Salona carried their dead out of the gates and laid them to rest along the roads leading away, which is why cemeteries flank the roads here. This ground is Manastirine, the remnant of a basilica and cemetery outside the town. Its story reaches further back than its Christian fame: the earliest parts date to the second century BC, long before any church stood here. The low walls and broken columns mark centuries of graves and buildings raised over them. What turned this field into a place of pilgrimage belongs to the next part of the story.

Photo: Akrasia25 · CC BY-SA 4.0

In the year 304, during Diocletian's persecution of Christians, the bishop Domnius was executed in Salona's amphitheatre. He was a bishop and martyr, and he was buried here, in the cemetery outside the walls. His grave gave this ground its fame. Raids damaged the buildings around it at the end of the fourth century, and in the mid-fifth century a three-nave basilica was raised here on top of the ruins. Around the martyr's tomb, a custom took hold that the cemeteries of Salona document well: Christians asked to be buried as close as possible to a martyr, ad sanctos, as the phrase went. A grave near Domnius became the resting place people wanted, and the graves crowded in around his. When the city fell centuries later, the bishop's seat was transferred to Split.

Original uploader was BobFog at it.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0

The carved head in the gable of this sarcophagus lid is Medusa, winged and framed like a mask. It is one of the fine marble sarcophagi that stood in the cemeteries of Salona, cut with figures and ornament for families who could afford the best. Several of the finest pieces from these graves have been moved to the Archaeological Museum in Split; others, like this one, remain where the necropolis keeps them. The Medusa belongs to the long pagan funerary tradition, and it is worth being honest about what that means here: not every tomb in this cemetery is Christian, and imagery like this does not by itself say who was buried inside. Who commissioned this sarcophagus, and when, is not known for certain.

Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0

Porta Caesarea was the ceremonial gate of the oldest part of Salona, built of large regular stones in the reign of Augustus. Two octagonal towers flank it, and it has three passages: a wide one in the middle for carts, and two narrow ones for pedestrians on either side. Grooves cut into the side pylons suggest the central passage could be closed with a movable grid. A reconstruction by the scholar Kähler gives the gate two storeys, the upper one richly decorated with half-columns, composite capitals and window openings, and a small courtyard inside for defence. Its military life did not last. When the city expanded east and west, the gate lost its defensive purpose and became the load-bearing support of the aqueduct instead.

BobFog at Italian Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Emperor Augustus built Salona its water. The aqueduct ran from the river Jadro into the city, a length of 3,850 metres, and these stone arches belong to that line. Calculations suggest it could supply enough water for about forty thousand people, which gives a measure of how large the capital had grown. The best-preserved stretch of the whole aqueduct lies north of the episcopal centre, where the line of arches and channel can still be followed across the ground.

BobFog at Italian Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

In the northwest part of the eastern city, Salona's Christians built their monumental core in the fifth century. The episcopal centre held twin lengthways basilicas, a baptistery and a Bishop's Palace, and its basilica is the largest in the whole of Dalmatia. The building boom came from wealth: Salona's prosperity in the fourth and fifth centuries paid for extensive church construction inside the walls and shrines to the martyrs outside. The standing of the complex matched its size. The bishop of Salona held the rank of metropolitan bishop of Dalmatia, the head of the church across the province. All of this has made Salona a major site for studying how early Christian sacred architecture developed.

Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0

The red brick structure in the ruins is the baptismal font of the episcopal centre, its cross-shaped plan still easy to trace in the exposed masonry. This was where new Christians entered the community. In the practice of the fifth century, baptism was by immersion: the candidate went down into the water and rose from it as a member of the church. Fonts of this period were often given shapes rich in meaning, and the octagonal form used in many baptisteries was read as a symbol of the new life the rite conferred. From this one room, the whole Christian city took in its newest members.

Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0

Salona had several sets of public baths, but the Great Thermae in the eastern part of the city were the largest, and they are the best preserved. They were built in the second century, or at the beginning of the third. The building is rectangular, with three apses arranged symmetrically on the north side and one on the west. The plan can still be traced through the ruins. An elongated room on the north side held a semicircular pool of cold water, the frigidarium. To its left lay two dressing rooms, fitted with benches and with openings in the wall for storing clothes. A room on the west side served for massage, the unctorium. Another room, ending in an apse, worked as a lounge and an exercise space at once. On the right came the hot end of the building: the caldarium, the tepidarium and the sudatorium, the sauna.

Carole Raddato from FRANKFURT, Germany · CC BY-SA 2.0