Pula, the Croatian port whose Roman arena has outlasted every empire that ruled it
At the southern tip of Istria sits a city of about 52,000 people built around one of the best preserved Roman amphitheatres anywhere. Pula has belonged to Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Venice, Napoleon, Austria, Italy and Yugoslavia, and today it keeps two official names, Croatian Pula and Italian Pola.
People were here long before the city. Traces of Homo erectus about a million years old turned up in a nearby cave, and Bronze Age Istrians built hilltop forts. Greek legend claimed the town was founded by Colchians who had chased Jason and the stolen Golden Fleece into the Adriatic, failed to catch him, and settled down in a place they named for refuge.
Rome took Istria in 177 BC, and under Julius Caesar the town became a colony. Backing Cassius in the civil war of 42 BC was a mistake; Octavian's side razed it, though it was rebuilt at the request of his daughter. Its arena went up between 27 BC and 68 AD, and a wall with ten gates enclosed a city that peaked around 30,000 inhabitants. Two reigning caesares, Crispus and Constantius Gallus, were executed there in the 4th century.
The medieval centuries were rough. Venice claimed the town in 1150, and it was sacked or wrecked in 1243, 1267 and 1397 amid wars with Pisa and Genoa. Plague, malaria and typhoid finished the job; by the 1750s only 3,000 people remained among weed-covered ruins. Dante, who visited, mentioned it in the Divine Comedy as a spot marking Italy's edge.
Revival came from the navy. A Danish admiral serving Austria chose its deep, sheltered harbour as the empire's main naval base in 1859, turning a faded provincial town into an industrial and shipbuilding city of 58,562 by 1910. After 1918 it passed to Italy, and after the Second World War most of its Italian population left before the city joined Yugoslavia on 15 September 1947. Winemaking, fishing, shipbuilding and tourism sustain it now.
Source: Pula
