The Hidden World of Antiquity / Eine Welt voller geheimnisse aus der Antike

In Medulin, on the Vižula peninsula, a significant Roman archaeological site with a patrician residential villa was discovered. The archaeological research (1995-2010) has confirmed that a luxurious residential part of the villa was situated on the western side of the Vižula peninsula. The excavated part of the villa, which gently rises from the coast along the slope of a hill, on the western part of the peninsula (sector 2), shows four terraces. On the first terrace, by the sea, was discovered a peristyle gallery (room 1) decorated with black and white mosaic tesserae (1st cent.); the corridor led to the pool in the thermal section (thermae) [5] also ornamented with the same type of black and white mosaic (1st-3rd centuries); the drainage system released water into the main canal to the sea. The rooms (3, 4) west of the peristyle wall lapped by the sea were covered with triangular multi-coloured marble crustae (opus sectile) – yellow, black, green and white. The large entrance from the peristyle corridor into the main chamber, bordered with a black and white mosaic, completes the picture. The second part of the building, on the higher second terrace, belonged to the large cistern with adjacent rooms. The black and white mosaic floor north of the adjacent room (48) was covered with ashes and later covered with a beaten earth floor. Research in 2006, north of the hypocaust on the third terrace, revealed a room with a Late Antique blue-ochre square mosaic (44). The floors of the three rooms on the third terrace, east of the hypocaust, were formed by a thick geometric polychrome mosaic, characteristic of the 4th century (50, 56, 57). In those rooms lattices and rhombi dominate, while the Latin and Greek crosses in the quadrants and rhombi of blue and black stone squares were frarmed by white mosaic tesserae. The decoration dated from the period of Emperor Constantine the Great (306-337). The central field of the promenade (50) is covered with a mosaic of the same basic geometrical motif, and is bordered by a two-strand polychrome lattice. A coin of Emperor Constantine the Great was found embedded in the northeastern corner of the mosaic floor of the corridor. The Late Antique corridor (ambulacrum) [50], originally decorated with the above-described mosaics, was divided and partly destroyed by a hearth made of pieces of olive presses and fragments of columns (spolia) during the barbarian invasions. The trapezoidal room (56) was paved with a mosaic carpet with a yellow geometric rhomboid pattern with a wide ochre frame made of ceramic. The floor of this room was also later destroyed by the construction of a corner-hearth (6th century).