Roman Thermal Baths (Vis Island)

The Roman baths of Vis lie on the flat coastal strip of Vis town, a short walk back from the waterfront and, unromantically, almost opposite a petrol station. The setting gives no hint of what sits behind the fence line: roughly 270 square metres of Roman mosaic floor, among the best preserved anywhere on the eastern Adriatic. The baths belong to Issa, the ancient city that made this small, far-flung island the most powerful place on the Dalmatian coast for several centuries before Rome absorbed it. Because Vis lies further out to sea than any other inhabited Croatian island, and because it spent most of the twentieth century sealed off as a military zone, the site has survived with far less interference than comparable ruins on the mainland.

From Greek Issa to a Roman Provincial Town

The city was founded in the 4th century BC by Dionysius the Elder, the tyrant of Syracuse, who planted the colony to give his Sicilian city a grip on shipping in the Adriatic. Issa prospered quickly. It enclosed roughly 9.8 hectares within Hellenistic defensive walls and built a theatre seating around 3,000 spectators, part of whose structure was later absorbed into a Franciscan monastery, where it can still be traced. Issa also founded settlements of its own along the mainland coast, among them Aspalathos on the site of modern Split, Tragurion at today's Trogir and Epidauros at Cavtat.

That independence ended with Rome's arrival in the region. Issa was besieged by the Illyrian queen Teuta around 230 BC and appealed to Rome; the fleet that answered broke Teuta's power and drew the city permanently into the Roman orbit during the First Illyrian War of 229-219 BC. The city kept a privileged standing for a time, but by 47 BC it had been reduced to an oppidum civium Romanorum and made dependent on the newly founded colony at Salona, near present-day Split. The baths belong to what came next: a comfortable provincial town of the imperial period rather than an assertive Greek city-state.

Inside the Bath Complex

The thermae were built in the 1st century AD in the coastal part of the town, where water supply and drainage were easiest to arrange. They follow the standard Roman sequence of rooms that a bather moved through in order: an apodyterium, or changing room, where clothes were left; a tepidarium kept moderately warm to acclimatise the body; a caldarium with hot-water basins; a sudatorium for dry sweating; and a frigidarium with a cold pool to close the circuit. The heat came from a hypocaust, a raised floor carried on pillars with hot air from a furnace circulating in the void beneath and rising through flues in the walls.

Baths on this scale were never only about washing. In a Roman town they worked as the everyday social centre, the place where business was discussed, news exchanged and afternoons spent, and the Vis tourist board describes the Issa thermae in exactly those terms, as the focus of an intensive social and cultural life. For a settlement of Issa's size the complex was ambitious, and the eastern wing, the part that has been fully excavated, is the most impressive surviving section.

The Mosaics and Their Long Restoration

Almost every room in the complex was floored in mosaic, some 270 square metres in all. The entrance rooms, the frigidarium and the tepidarium have come through best. The designs are dominated by simple geometric repeats, and specialists treat them as a benchmark example of early Roman mosaic work on the eastern Adriatic coast. The one exception to the geometry is a panel of four blue dolphins on a white ground, set in the passage into the large hall of the eastern wing. They are the only surviving figural image on the site, and they point to the Hellenistic tradition that local workshops carried forward, with the mosaic school at Salona the clearest influence.

The floors have been examined and treated repeatedly. The first substantial conservation followed archaeological campaigns in 1961 and 1963 led by Branimir Gabricevic of the Archaeological Museum in Split, during which the frigidarium mosaics were lifted so the layers beneath could be investigated. The ancient walls had already suffered badly during the Second World War. Since 1999 the Croatian Conservation Institute's Split department has run a systematic programme here, documenting the floors, cleaning and consolidating them, reintegrating losses and, where the bedding had failed, lifting mosaics in segments and returning them to their original position once the base had been rebuilt.

Reaching the Site and the Rest of Issa

The baths are open ground rather than a museum building, so the visit itself is short; the footing is uneven and the mosaics read best in the raking light of morning or late afternoon. The portable finds are in the Archaeological Museum of Vis, housed in Gospina Batarija, an Austrian fortress of the early nineteenth century above the harbour. Its collection runs from prehistoric material through Hellenistic and Roman finds and includes a 4th-century BC bronze head of Artemis and around 600 amphorae raised from the seabed at Vela Svitnja, stacked as they were once stowed in a ship's hold.

Getting to Vis takes some commitment. The island covers about 90 square kilometres, rises to 587 metres at Hum and has a resident population of roughly 3,300; there is no bridge and no airport. The Jadrolinija car ferry from Split takes around two hours and twenty minutes and the catamaran about an hour and a half, and plenty of visitors to Dalmatia never make the crossing at all. The ruins are best reached during a gulet cruise along the Croatia coast, which puts you alongside in Vis harbour a few minutes' walk from the mosaics. That isolation is not only a matter of geography: the Yugoslav People's Army held the island as a naval base and kept it closed to foreign visitors until 1989, sparing Vis the building boom that reshaped much of the coast and leaving the baths, and the town around them, largely as they were.