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Stari Grad Plain

Croatie (Europe et Amérique du nord)

Date de soumission : 01/02/2005
Critères: (i)(ii)(iii)(v)
Catégorie : Culturel
Soumission préparée par :
Ministry of Culture
Coordonnées
N 43°06'55'E16°36'10'
Ref.: 2016

Description

In a large fertile plain between Stari Grad to the west and Jelsa and Vrboska on the east of Hvar lies the Stari Grad Plain, the biggest plain, or flat area, field, on any of the Adriatic islands. The Plain stretches East-West about 6 km, and about 2 km North-South. On the southern side rises the island’s mountain chain (highest peak of St Nicholas/ sv. Nikola at 628 m) from which numerous occasional streams, big and small, flow down to the Plain. On the slopes of it, on the less fertile sides, there is a series of villages: Dol, Vrbanj, Svirce, Vrisnik and Pitve. On the northern side of the field there are gentle little hills across which the massif of the neighbouring island of Brac can clearly be seen. From a geological point of view, Stari Grad Plain is one of the most interesting of Adriatic phenomena. Between a ridge that stands out as a peninsula on the northern side of the western part of Hvar Island (Kabal, 125 m) and the main spur of the mountain range of the central part of the island, stretch the drowned valley of the Stari Grad Bay and flat lands with sandy-loess sediments that obviously extended to the area of the Brac Channel, now under the sea. During the last ice age (Wurm) the level of the sea was 96.4 m lower than it is now, which means that today’s Hvar island was a mainland mountain (722 m), with a turbulent meteorological position, and that the bora, the dry, cold wind from the land at the site of today’s Hvar Channel, carried and deposited the loess into the friable covering of Stari Grad Plain, which thus became the largest and most fertile of all the fields, plains, of the Adriatic islands – the most important of the facts in the natural, cultural and historical inventory of the island.

Right down to the present day, over the whole of the area of this Plain, its oldest piece of land division, the chora, created after the colonisation by the Greeks from the Aegean island of Paros in about 384 BC, is still almost totally conserved, as is clearly seen in all maps and aerial shots. This clarity on the land is all due to the hands of the farm labourers who from the most ancient times have bounded their plots with the many dry stone walls, of various different dimensions. Some of them are just a common fence between two holdings, while others (on the whole those that were built on the basis of the Greek surveyors’ lines) are very broad, and have also been used as roads. Apart from that, there are also the country huts, trims or kažuns or bunjas as they are known – little beehive-shaped dry stone buildings in which tools were kept and in which it was possible to shelter during bad weather. Though the land is fertile, the Mediterranean climate, with its moderate precipitation, is the cause of frequent water shortages, for which reason over the whole of the field there are a great many large or small cisterns for the collection and retention of rainwater, almost always built below the surface of the land. The whole of the length of the northern part of the Plain, in the North-South direction, is the road that links Jelsa and Vrboska with Stari Grad and the other parts of the island. In the very centre of the Plain is a small earth strip created in 1950 for the crop spraying and fire fighting planes.

Since this flat land is the greatest and most fertile field on any of the Adriatic islands, particularly in the centre of the archipelago, today too, as through the whole of its history, it has retained its primary agricultural nature, without any construction to jeopardise the original image. These are the classic products of Mediterranean agriculture, the grape vine and the olive tree.



Prehistory

Because of its geographical position, and all the opportunities that it affords, the Stari Grad Plain and its environs have been populated since the earliest time. We can state with total certainty that, somewhere in the 6th to 5th century BC, in the space occupied today by Stari Grad (on a little peninsula at the head of a deeply recessed bay) there was what was probably the central settlement of the area. Its existence is confirmed archaeologically in the SE part of today’s Stari Grad, alongside the little Church of St John [Ivan], where below the Greek layer a thick layer of charred remains of the earlier settlement can be seen, together with the main fragments of domestically made but also imported (Greek) ceramics.

The settlement belonged to a small Iron Age Illyrian tribal community that then dominated the Plain. It surrounded it with many forts so as to be able the better to control their own territory and the area around. It is very likely that some of these forts (Lompic, Purkin kuk, Glavica, Gracišce, Hum-sv. Vid, Tor) and many of the stone tumuli or barrows in the poloje and around it (Stari Grad-Priko, the slopes north of Vrisnik) belonged to even earlier, i.e., Bronze Age, inhabitants of this part.



Antiquity

Greek colonisation

Contacts between the island of Hvar and the Greek world commenced in a more major way in the 6th century BC (when the Illyrian population of the hills moved down to the coast), as shown by several fragments of red and black figural Greek ceramics of the 5th and 6th centuries.

When the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius the Elder expanded his power, the Adriatic Sea became increasingly interesting to the Hellenistic world. When Issa was founded, Dionysius’ colony on the island of Vis, in about 394 BC, the Greeks started their drive to the other Dalmatian islands and the mainland.

First to bear the brunt of this expansion was Hvar, where the inhabitants of the Aegean island of Paros, in 384, with the assistance of Dionysius, founded their colony of Pharos.

Judging from the sources (Diodorus of Sicily XV. 14, 1) and archaeological research (a burned Illyrian settlement, remains of a Greek triumphal inscription concerning their defeat of the Illyrians) the founding of the city did not take place in peace, for the Illyrians of the place, backed up by their allies on the mainland (the Jadasins tribe) were stout in their defence of, primarily, the Plain.

After initial troubles, the city was founded, and circled by walls. The perimeter of Greek Pharos is fairly well known today. Best seen is the juncture of the southern and eastern ramparts by the Church of St John, and part of the nearby city gate, with towers, on the eastern rampart. At the same place, Remeta Garden, as it is called, or Remeta House, part of the grid of the city streets has been unearthed, together with houses from several phases of the construction.

Of moveable archaeological items, most outstanding are various kinds of Greek ceramic, some of which was made in the local workshops. After that there are coins (there was a Pharian mint), inscriptions, extremely little stone moulding, and jewellery and so on. It is worth mentioning a trove of coins from the position called Škudljivac on the northern side of the Plain.

In parallel with the construction of the city, the subdivision of the Plain started out; this was actually a key moment in Stari Grad and Croatian history, one that was to leave its mark on this land forever.

The Greek colonists, that is, divided the area described into 75 cadastral plots, chora, as they are called, measuring 181 x 905 metres. The land in each individual chora was further divided by lot (perhaps into 5 squares of 181 x 181 m), and between the individual holdings, stone boundaries were placed, some of which have been found (that of Mathias Pitheo for example).

Very likely people actually lived in the Plain as well, as shown by archaeological finds (the most of them are in the region of Stari Grad).

Apart from the subdivision of the land, the Greeks also set about defending it. In so doing, they occupied the old Illyrian forts and built their own towers on the sites, their own lookout points (Glavica, Purkin kuk, Tor and Maslinovik), from which they could control both the Plain and the surroundings.



Roman antiquity

After the collapse of the Syracusan empire in the middle of the 4th century BC, Pharos was suddenly unprotected from Illyrian ambitions; in fact, between 229 and 229 it became the capital of the biggest historical personality of the island, Demetrius of Hvar. After the defeat of Queen Teuta by the Romans, he ruled almost sovereignly in this area, from the Krka River to Drac. In the conflicts of Demetrius with Rome in 219 BC, Pharos was partially destroyed, but was soon rebuilt with the assistance of its metropolis of Paros, as shown by two Greek inscriptions that have been discovered.

From the middle of the 2nd century BC, the Romans started to carry out expeditions against the Delmats and other Illyrians, making use of the strategic and logistic capacities of the ports of Hvar, as well as those on the Pakleni Islands and the forested island of Šcedro (Taurida to the Romans), before which in 47 BC there was a crucial sea battle for the control of the Adriatic between the navies of Caesar and Pompey.

In the Roman period the whole island was criss-crossed with traces of working and leisure facilities, with a great concentration in Hvar, Stari Grad and around Jelsa. Greek Pharos changed its name and became Roman Pharia.

All this time, the island of Hvar lived the life of the classical island, of grapes, fishing, and commerce, as shown by the many archaeological traces. In Stari Grad a layer of Roman houses richly equipped with floor mosaics has been preserved (ulica Sridnja kola). In the surrounds of the town, i.e., in the Plain, the Romans built their working and leisure facilites, the villae rusticae (Ivonceve njive, Mirje, Carevac and Stipanica, for example). The best known, partially-investigated, such villa is north of Dol, at the site known as Kupinovik.

Apart from these, the Romans also built water cisterns, some of which are still in use.

The Plain was also used for burials, as shown by the occasional finds of graves.



Late antiquity

In the written sources we can find only scanty references to the island during later antiquity, yet this silence is being increasingly compensated for by archaeological records from occasional probes in Hvar and more systematic research that is being carried out in Stari Grad.

Pharia was fortified again, and its perimeter narrowed, but in the same time the earlier Greek ramparts were also made use of.The later antiquity ramparts are partially preserved in the so-called Gromotor Cellar.

In the SE part, during the 5th and particularly during the 6th century, a complex of Early Christian double graves was built (St John the Baptist, St Mary), with a baptistery and catechumen hall decorated with mosaics, and Faria probably (which is still not certain) became the seat of the local bishop. A crucial role was played in this too by the rich Plain, in which the earlier-mentioned facilities went on with their lives.



The Middle Ages

During the Dark Ages of the 7th and 8th centuries, the city and its surrounds were sacked, and the ecclesiastical complex around St John’s was destroyed. It has been restored several times since then, but the area has always been considerably reduced.

The Hvar See was founded officially in the 12th century, its seat being in Stari Grad, and the cathedral is preserved in the foundations of today’s Parish Church of St Stephen the Pope.

This part of the island was in the early Middle Ages owned by the princes of Neretva, and it was headed by a župan, who was also the župan of Brac and Vis. In the 13th century, the island of Hvar was divided into the Hvar commune in the west and the territory of the župan (a predominantly Slavonic area) in the east. The border went more or less along the DUbovica-Maslinica line. The Stari Grad Plain thus stayed in the control of the župan. In the Middle Ages it had the name… campus sancti Stephani… after the patron saint of the diocese. Along the southern edge of it, at that time several smaller settlements started to develop (Vrisnik, Svirce, Pitve, Vrbanj, Dol). However, since the town of Hvar was increasingly gaining in strength as communal and trading centre, and an important maritime port, in about 1249 the diocese shifted its seat to the cit of Hvar. In 1278 the Hvar commune submitted to the Venetian Republic, and the power of the commune spread to the whole of the island, precisely for the sake of the biggest economic resource on the island – the Plain of Stari Grad. Venice, introducing the commune system, paralysed the patriarchal family structure on the island, and as early as 1310 a revolt erupted on the island, led by the noblemen Juraj and Galeša Slavogost. The Commune Statute was systematised in 1331. From 1358 the island was once again under the aegis of the Hungarian-Croatian kingdom, and governed by the kings of Bosnia, even by Dubrovnik – up to 1420 – when it was taken by the Venetians, with the rest of Dalmatia, and held down to the downfall of their own republic in 1797. A bloody plebeian revolution in 1510 on Hvar led by Matija Ivanic, set off by the aspirations of the commons to have equal rights with the nobles, last for more than five years, and ended with the intervention of the Venetian army and the sacking and looting of Vrboska. Throughout the whole of the medieval period, the Stari Grad Plain was almost entirely possessed by the nobility and the church. Since this period, the 14th/15th century, there has been a Hvar Statute, and the first descriptions of the Plain, in which the many mounds are mentioned (maceria) – the long dry stone walls disposed along the Greek lines, which have their own names (Crna gomila, Dragojeva gomila, Didina gomila, Vela Gomila).



The period from the end of the 18th to the end of the 20th century

In 1797 the island of Hvar was once again under Austrian rule, up to the coming of the French in 1806. In 1813, Hvar was once again taken by the Austrians, during whose administration, particularly in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, the island underwent a new flourishing. The Austrian administration undertook the first official survey of the land of the island of Hvar, and a cadastre was drawn up; there were also a number of utility operations in the area of the Stari Grad Plain, of which the most important was the engineering works of the streams that irrigate the fertile plain. In November 1918 the island was occupied by the Italian army, in major conflicts, right up to the Treaty of Rapallo, in 1921, when Hvar with Croatia entered the kingdom and after World War II the socialist republic of Yugoslavia. When Croatia was finally recognised as a sovereign state on January 15 1991, the island of Hvar became a part of the Split and Dalmatia County in the territorial and administrative reorganisation of the country.