Mostine Villa Rustica

VillaDalmatia · Mostine district, Split, Croatia, near Solinska cesta, toward SalonaBuilt 50 CE

About

Excavators working ahead of a shopping-center expansion at Mostine, on Split's edge toward Salona, uncovered a 2,000-square-meter villa rustica with stone walls still standing 1.5 meters high. Stone channels, a cistern and an oil press mark it as a working farm that shipped olive oil to Salona, just a few kilometers away. Archaeologists trace its founding to as early as the 1st century CE, making it the strongest documented Roman presence on the Split site nearly two centuries before Diocletian's palace.

What happened here

A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.