Pišča

The forgotten third piece

A town, a necropolis, and what kept them alive

When people talk about Velika Mrdakovica, almost all the attention goes to the hill fort and the necropolis — the stones you can see and the bones you can dig. But the ancient town on the summit needed one thing that no fortification and no rich grave can replace: water.

In a karst landscape like this one, where rainwater sinks through limestone almost the moment it touches the ground, the ability to collect, retain and survive the summer was not a luxury. It was the precondition for a town existing on this hill at all. The cistern known as Pišča is exactly that third, less glamorous part of the Mrdakovica story — the one without which neither the rhyton nor the fibulae would have had anywhere to come from.

The catalogue of the Šibenik City Museum, which we have used as the source for the rest of this archaeological collection, mentions Pišča only in passing — as one of the three parts that were planned in 2014 to be linked by a footpath: the Pišča cistern, the settlement and the necropolis. A detailed archaeological study of the cistern itself — its dimensions, precise construction technique, capacity — is not part of the available catalogue.

What we know

Roman, not Ottoman

The cistern is sometimes referred to locally as the "Turkish cistern" — a name which, however evocative, is historically inaccurate. The construction dates to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, that is, the height of Roman presence in this area — centuries before any Ottoman episode on this coast.

It is a karst catchment — a system for collecting and holding surface water in a landscape where water is otherwise precious and short-lived. And, perhaps most remarkably: it still works. Two thousand years after the Romans dug and lined it, the cistern continues to do exactly what it was built to do.

Few structures can claim that after two thousand years they are still good at what they were made for. This one can.

The name Pišča is thought to derive from a verb describing water that "trickles" or seeps — though the etymology of local place names is never a fully settled matter, and this remains more a folk interpretation than a documented derivation.

Why it mattered

A town that survived six centuries has to drink

Arauzona — the town on the crest of Velika Mrdakovica — maintained continuity of life for six centuries, from the 4th century BC to the 3rd century AD. That means generations of people, hundreds of households, livestock, gardens — all on top of a karst hill with no river in the immediate vicinity.

The solution to that problem in the ancient world is almost always the same: cisterns, collecting rainwater from roofs and slopes, and underground reservoirs that hold it through the hot Dalmatian summer. Pišča was, in all likelihood, exactly such a system — infrastructure without which neither the fortified settlement above nor the rich trading connections described on other pages of this collection would have been possible.

It is not as glamorous as the rhyton. It does not tell the story of symposiums and elite. But without it, nobody would have been here to drink from one.

The project

Three parts, one path

According to the catalogue, the plan — already in preparation when it was written in 2014 — was to link the Pišča cistern, the settlement and the necropolis by a footpath into a single unit, and to present the Liburnian-Roman town to the public after the completion of research and conservation.

The idea is straightforward and well-conceived: instead of three separate, hard-to-reach sites, a single route leading the visitor through the whole story — from the water that kept the town alive, through the walls within which that life unfolded, to the graves that hold its final testimony.

As far as we are aware, that path is still awaiting its full realisation. When that changes — and the catalogue closes with the conviction that it will — this page will be the first to note it.

Honestly

This is a shorter page, and that is fine

Unlike the Rhyton or the necropolis, where the catalogue of the Šibenik City Museum runs to dozens of pages of detail — sketches, measurements, find catalogues — Pišča is mentioned in the available sources in a single sentence. Everything written here is grounded in what we can support with a source.

If additional documentation exists — a conservation report, measurements, photographs of the cistern itself — this page will gladly grow the moment that material becomes available. For now, it is enough to know that it exists, that it is Roman, and that it still works.

Sources

Toni Brajković, Velika Mrdakovica — Results of the Latest Archaeological Research (2011–2013)

Šibenik City Museum, 403rd temporary exhibition · Vodice, 2014 · ISBN 978-953-58070-0-1 · English translation: Marija Mlinar

This page was prepared for guests of Arauzona on the basis of the catalogue cited above. For scholarly reference, please contact the Šibenik City Museum.