Roman Forum

Zadar's Roman Forum is the largest known Roman forum on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, an open rectangle of roughly 45 by 90 metres in the middle of the old town peninsula. Work on it began under the first emperor, Augustus, and continued into the third century AD, by which time Zadar had all the equipment of a proper Roman colony. What survives is mostly at ground level — pavement, steps, column bases and one standing column — but the outline of the square is unmistakable.

Iadera: How Zadar Became a Roman City

Before Rome, this was a Liburnian settlement, laid out on the peninsula as early as the ninth century BC. The Romans knew the place as Iadera, made it a municipium in the middle of the first century BC and then a colony, colonia Iulia Iader, around 48 BC, settling veterans there. The town was rebuilt on the standard Roman grid, with a forum at the intersection of the main streets, public baths, a drainage system and water carried in by an aqueduct running roughly 40 kilometres from Lake Vrana.

That grid is still legible on a modern map. Kalelarga — officially Široka ulica, the wide street, and the busiest shopping street in Zadar — follows the line of the ancient decumanus maximus, while the cross street now named after the sixteenth-century bishop and writer Šimun Kožičić Benja marks the other axis. The forum sat at their junction, which is why the centre of the city still gravitates to the same spot two thousand years later.

The Largest Forum on the Eastern Adriatic

The square was framed on three sides by a two-storey portico with colonnades, with shops and workshops set behind the ground-floor arcade, giving a commercial edge to what was primarily a civic and religious space. At one end stood the Capitolium, the temple dedicated to the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, raised on a podium above the level of the square with a monumental staircase leading up to it.

The dating rests on more than architectural style. Two stone inscriptions from the third century AD, found on the site, record the forum's completion and name Augustus as its founder, which gives the complex an unusually secure attribution for a provincial forum. Construction spanned close to three centuries, which is normal enough: forums grew by accretion, each generation of magistrates adding a portico, a temple or a set of honorific statues.

What Survives: Pavement, Columns and a Pillar of Shame

Crossing the forum today, the original stone paving and the steps of the Capitolium are the most obvious remains, along with scattered bases, capitals and architrave fragments left where they were found. Two monumental columns are known, but only one still stands in its original position, a tall shaft that has become the informal symbol of the site.

That column had a long second life. In the Middle Ages it served as Zadar's pillar of shame, where offenders were chained up for public humiliation, and the iron fittings from that period are still attached to it. On the western side of the Capitolium, a stretch of plastered wall preserves fragments of painted decoration associated with the mystery cult of Cybele, the Great Mother, whose worship spread widely through the Roman provinces — a rare survival of Roman wall painting in this part of the Adriatic.

St Donatus and the Reuse of the Forum

The building that dominates the site is not Roman at all. The Church of St Donatus, a massive circular structure raised in the ninth century, stands directly on the forum's paving and is the largest pre-Romanesque building in Croatia. Its builders quarried the ruins around them: Roman columns, blocks and inscribed stones are set into its foundations and lower walls as spolia, and they are easy to spot at the base of the rotunda. The church was recorded in the tenth century by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, which is part of why its date is reasonably firm.

Much of what is visible was uncovered by accident and necessity. Allied bombing in 1943 and 1944 destroyed a large part of the old town, and the post-war clearance of rubble, followed by systematic excavation, exposed forum pavement and structures that had been built over for centuries.

The Forum Today

The square is officially called Poljana pape Ivana Pavla II, John Paul II Square, and functions as Zadar's open-air living room: concerts, screenings and festivals run here through the summer, including the long-standing Musical Evenings in St Donatus series, which makes use of the church's famously resonant acoustics. The site is open at all hours and free to walk across, with the Archaeological Museum on one side and the cathedral of St Anastasia a few steps away.

The forum also sits inside a wider protected landscape: Zadar's Venetian defensive walls and gates were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2017, and the episcopal complex around St Donatus is on Croatia's tentative list. The whole ensemble is compact enough to see in a morning, and it is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Croatia, since the city's marinas are within easy walking distance of the old town.