Byzantine Exarchate & Early Slavic Settlement

Eastern Roman rule and the Orthodox transformation of the eastern Mediterranean and Balkans.

1 chapter

-177 - 476

Rome transformed Histria into a provincial outpost of empire. The Pula Arena—built between 27 BCE and 68 CE—dominates the city as the best-preserved Roman amphitheatre with four side towers still standing. On the Forum, the Temple of Augustus proclaims imperial cult worship. Stand inside the Arena's underground galleries and you see the mechanism of Roman spectacle: beast pens, gladiator corridors, and the machinery of provincial pacification. The former Histri capital at Nesactium became a Roman municipality, its Iron Age ramparts absorbed into the imperial road network.

788 - 1267

The Carolingian expansion brought feudal organization and, critically, the Glagolitic script—a Slavic literacy tradition unique to this Adriatic corridor. Interior Istria became the heartland of Glagolitic manuscript culture, where monks wrote Church Slavonic in their own alphabet while the coast remained Latin-speaking. Walk the Glagolitic Alley from Roč to Hum and you traverse a 7-kilometer stone chronicle of Slavic letters: eleven monuments erected in 1977–1985 that transformed an ancient literacy tradition into a walkable pilgrimage. At Hum—the world's smallest town—read the Glagolitic inscription on the town gate, a direct material trace of this literary revolution.

-1000 - -177

Before Rome, the Histri—a pre-Illyrian people—ruled the peninsula from fortified hilltop settlements (gradine). Their capital at Nesactium (Vizače) commanded southern Istria's trade routes, while cave sites like Šandalja preserve evidence of human habitation reaching back to the Paleolithic. Walk the earthen ramparts at Nesactium and you stand where the last Histri king, Epulon, made his final stand against Roman legions in 177 BCE. The Histri left no written records, but their material world—hillforts, ceramics, metalwork—remains legible across the landscape.

1267 - 1797

For five centuries, Istria was split: Venice ruled the coast as part of the Stato da Màr, while the Habsburgs held the interior around Pazin. Coastal towns like Rovinj, Vodnjan, and Motovun absorbed Venetian civic culture—stone loggias, clock towers, the Istro-Venetian dialect—while retaining self-governance within the Republic. The Trka na prstenac (Race of the Ring) in Barban, first documented in 1696 when the Loredan family organized the tournament for a fair, bridges both worlds: a Venetian-origin spectacle that became Istria's signature living ritual. Buje, the 'sentinel of Istria,' watched over the frontier between these two worlds. The Venetian layer is both colonial and local—a paradox that Istrian identity still embraces.