Roman Forum of Zadar

Laid out by Emperor Augustus in the 1st century BC and completed under Tiberius in the 3rd century AD, the Roman Forum of Zadar was the beating civic heart of the Roman colony of Iader. Even in its half-ruined state today it remains the largest Roman forum on the eastern Adriatic — a great open rectangle of pale limestone flagstones flanked by fragments of columns, the base of the temple podium, and the remarkable 'Pillar of Shame' (a 14-metre Corinthian column re-erected in the Middle Ages as a stocks for public humiliation of criminals). The forum was severely damaged in Allied bombing of 1943–44 and paradoxically that destruction of medieval overlay revealed the Roman layout in extraordinary clarity. Walking the flagstones, look for the deep grooves worn by 1,500 years of cartwheels and the inscriptions on scattered altar bases. The forum shares its plaza with the great pre-Romanesque Church of St. Donatus (built directly on Roman foundations, using the forum's own columns for structural support) and the Byzantine-era Cathedral of St. Anastasia — making this open space one of the most concentrated ensembles of Roman, early Christian and Byzantine architecture anywhere on the Adriatic. Free to visit and always open; come at golden hour when the low sun rakes across the flagstones and picks out every carved detail.