Salona and Tilurium, Two Interconnected Stone Carving Centres

Abstract

Salona and Tilurium were two settlements at a distance of some 30 km. Salona was a city and a Roman colonia, while Tilurium was a fortress of the Seventh Legion. These two settlements were interconnected economically and culturally, as the former was the latter's harbour, supplying it with various commodities for the army units. As early as the foundation of the fortress, Tilurium became a stone carving centre, whose workshops produced the so-called Gardun Trophy and a series of funerary stelae decorated with weapons and military equipment. There is no doubt that the carvers in Tilurium continued their work for several decades after finishing the Gardun Trophy. The soldiers of the Seventh Legion, stationed at Tilurium, were detached to serve in Salona, where some of them died. Despite being produced in Salona, their funerary monuments were designed in imitation of "Tilurian" shapes, which is further proved by the kind of stone used (most probably the limestone from the quarry in Siget, a village in the vicinity of Trogir, Roman Tragurium, a coastal town northwest of Salona). Once the Seventh Legion had left Tilurium, the stone carvers moved to the fortress of the Ninth Legion at Burnum, where they continued to produce funerary monuments showing "Tilurian" characteristics. Later on, iconographic traits of Tilurian workshops appeared sporadically in Salona (doors by the sides of the inscription field on one sarcophagus). When the soldiers had left for the Danube limes, the inhabitants of the area still sometimes purchased funerary stones in Salona (the sarcophagus of Claudia Quintina).