Dubrovnik - history

The City of Dubrovnik is under UNESCO protection. Several thousand years before Christ, by some estimates 6000 years and 2000-3000 years by others, the area near Dubrovnik was inhabited. The existence of the city was lost in the cloudy course of history, legends are interwoven with historical facts and there are no preserved documents from those ancient times or there are so few that historians and archaeologists are left with the massive task of bringing these many assumptions on the life near Dubrovnik to light. One thing is certain - Dubrovnik is an old city, standing on its stone cliffs for at least 14 centuries. Before Dubrovnik, there was a much older city, Epidaurum, which developed in the area of where Cavtat is today, 18 kilometres southeast of Dubrovnik. Until the time of its demise in the 7th century, Epidaurum existed for at least 10 and perhaps as many as 12 centuries. Some historians have stated that the Greeks founded the colony as early as the 7th century before Christ. In the clash between the epoch and the people, Epidaurum, the city of antiquity, was erased from the map, and its small number of inhabitants sought refuge in the neighbouring regions, today's Zupa Dubrovacka, where the fortified cities of Spilan and Gradac (Burnum) were, and the rocky islet Laus, also inhabited, which thus became the first city core of old Dubrovnik. The rapid settlement of Laus was the beginning of development of a new city, today's Dubrovnik (in the 7th century) which would, on that small rocky area, grow deep roots and build a glorious and heroic history in the stormy centuries to follow. During the 7th century, the Slavic tribes, among them the superior Croats, had already set up permanent residence along the majority of the eastern Adriatic coast, with the exception of a few fortified Roman cities, which were more and more becoming ethnic islands in the flood of the Slavic population. In comparison to the development of cities with a Roman population, a settlement was developing near Ragusium, at the foothills of Mount Srd, which received the Croatian name Dubrovnik. The name came from the oak forests which even today are called "dubrave" today. During the 10th and 11th centuries, the sea strait between the two settlements became shallower due to alleviation and in the end was dried up. When the two settlements, already joined together, were fortified and strengthened within the same city walls at the end of 12th century, the result was Dubrovnik Old Town, an urban centre preserved to the present day.

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