Histria (ancient city)

Histria (Greek Ἰστρίη ), also Istria, Istros ( Ἴστρος ) or Istropolis ( Ἰστρόπολις ), was an ancient city near modern Romanian Istria place on the western coast of the Black Sea.

History

Histria was founded as a colony of the Ionian city of Miletus at the end of the 7th century BC. It took its name from the Danube, whose lower reaches of the Greeks called Istros and which opens at Histria into the Black Sea. After the Persian Wars Histria lived in the 5th century BC, a flower ( urban expansion, coinage ). In the 4th century BC it came under Scythian influence, since Alexander the Great at the Macedonian. From the 1st century BC, Histria belonged to the Roman sphere of influence, separated by a short reign of the Dacian king Burebista over the city. The decline of the city, which belonged to the Roman Empire to the Roman province of Moesia inferior ( Niedermösien ), sat with a plundered by the Goths middle of the 3rd century AD, but she insisted, since Diocletian as part of the province of Scythia, not until the early Byzantine period continued. After being destroyed by the Avars and Slavs Histria was abandoned at the beginning of the 7th century AD.

Archeology

Since 1914, repeated archaeological excavations of Romanian researchers took place in Histria, the parts of the Byzantine and Roman buildings uncovered and penetrated to the earliest Greek films that date back to the 7th century BC. Of the buildings from pre-Roman times, the foundations of a temple dedicated to Zeus Polieus from the 6th century BC, remains of a small Doric temple for Theos Megas and a Hellenistic temple to Aphrodite were found. Part of the vast number of archaeologically researched buildings in the late phase of the city ( 4th to 6th centuries). Four stages of the city walls ( archaic, Hellenistic, Early Imperial time, 3rd century after the Goteneinfall ) were observed.

The archaeological site of Histria carries the European Heritage Label.