Dynastic History|Manastirine, Salona — The Congress Among the Graves

Roman law kept burial outside the walls, so the dead of Salona lay in cemeteries along the roads out of the city. At Manastirine, north of the walls, graves gathered around those of Christians condemned under Diocletian's persecution edicts, and cemetery basilicas were raised over them in successive layers. Salona was the capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia; the palace Diocletian built for his retirement stands six kilometres to the south-west.

That the relics of Domnius, a bishop of Salona, and of Anastasius were later carried into the palace and installed in the emperor's mausoleum is recorded by Constantine VII in the tenth century and by Thomas the Archdeacon of Split in the thirteenth, three and six centuries after the fact. The year Salona was destroyed in the Avar and Slav invasions of the seventh century is still argued among archaeologists, and the site has never been fully excavated.

Digging here began about 180 years ago under Lanza, the first director of the Archaeological Museum in Split, and continued under Carrara, Glavinić and Egger, and later a Croatian-French team led by Marin and Duval. In 1894 Frane Bulić convened the first International Congress of Christian Archaeology here; the congress still dates its tradition to Spalato-Salona 1894, and the eighteenth in the series met in 2024. Four years after the first, Bulić put up a small house at the edge of the ruins and called it the Tusculum, after Cicero's retreat. It stands there still, holding the museum's Salona branch collection and his library, at the near end of a field of broken sarcophagi and column drums.

📸 Cover: the cemetery basilica at Manastirine, Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons