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15 Chapter 2 Krvavici, Croatia Fall 2005 The Istrian peninsula of what is now called Croatia juts into the northern head of the Adriatic Sea like a shark’s tooth. At a crossroads of ancient trade routes, it has seen its share of violence and blood but today it is a natural gem, a bucolic land of charming old towns and villages, linked together by roads older than anyone’s memory. From the altitude of an airplane, the roads can be seen to follow the natural contours of a rocky, rugged landscape, twisting and dodging around hillocks and karst pits and meandering gently from one village to another. The tiny fields edged with stone walls are a crazy quilt pattern laid out in a time when it was far more important to use every foot of arable earth than to make it easy on a surveyor. The largest city in Istria is Pula. During World War 2 Istria was part of Italy, which curved up around the Adriatic like a collar, and the city was known as Pola. It lies east-southeast of Venice, on the eastern shore of the sea, and like that venerable, water-soaked city of palazzos, piazzas, and canals, Pula also was founded on trade. A wide, natural harbor, studded with achingly beautiful islands , has led merchant ships here since ancient Rome. One local tradition has it that the city was founded by Jason of the Golden Fleece. Be that as it may, the city and the surrounding countryside are friendly, intriguing, and full of archaeological wonders, evidence of a thriving humanity seeking to wrest a living here for thousands of years. The Romans are the most visible of the occupiers, leaving behind grand and noble structures, many still in use. But the Romans were followed by the Eastern Goths, and then followed a couple of centuries of rule by Byzantium, and a succession of others. Franks followed the Byzantine rulers, and the Venetians extended their hand into the region. In 1379, the bright blue waters around Pula turned red when the Genoese destroyed the Venetian fleet and leveled 16 The Final Mission of Bottoms Up much of Pula itself. In 1797 the area became part of the Austrian Empire, and in 1866 Pula became headquarters of the Austrian war fleet. World Wars 1 and 2 again brought death, misery, and destruction to the peninsula, but following the hostilities once more the people living here reclaimed the area and reconstructed their lives and the wonderful old stone buildings topped with the ubiquitous red tile roofs. On a bright day in the fall of 2005, archaeologist Luka Bekic walked across a cleared track that defined the route of a natural gas pipeline to be constructed in the next couple of years. Bekic (pronounced BEK-ich) was three inches over six feet, and his long legs strode easily over the uneven, raw gash in the centuriesold fields. Although clear and cloudless, the day was cold, and Bekic wore a red parka, protection against the wind as much as the chilly temperature. Behind him on a ridgeline was a yellow marker that signified the main structure of the 1st century Roman villa that he and his colleagues were excavating, before pipeline construction would render useless any archaeological information to be gleaned from this site. The country around the ancient village of Krvavici northeast of Pula was remote, rugged, and difficult to negotiate in anything other than a four-wheeldrive truck or by hard walking. Occasionally, a nearby farmer chugged through the area on an antique tractor, in search of an errant cow or to bring in firewood against the coming winter. The fields were still marked by centuries-old stone walls built of rocks plucked from the enclosures. The fields and walls were in the same locations as shown on a local map from 1800, in the hands of the same families for more than 200 years. Bekic, head of the division of archaeological heritage of the Hrvatski Restauratorski Zavod, the Croatian Conservation Institute, was searching for evidence of other outlying buildings on the grand Roman villa. For hundreds of years Romans had dominated the area around Pula, far up on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, and it was not uncommon to find evidence of their tenure. In Pula itself, which bills itself as 3,000 years old, a fine Roman amphitheater remains, still in use after two millennia and booked for gigs by such major talents...

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