VIŽULA

"Folk tales and old historiography have often placed the Histrian settlement of Mutila in the wide archaeological area of the Medulin Bay, in the southernmost part of the Istrian peninsula.

It is possible that Mutila oppidum, the city that was destroyed and conquered in the Histrian-Roman war in 177 BC, was situated in the present large archaeological complex of Vižula, in the very centre of Medulin Bay. It was strategically defended from the southeastern known locality of Punta Kašteja from the Bronze and Iron Age and from the southwestern hill fort settlements on Premantura's peninsula. The prehistoric settlement on Vižula gives evidence of life in the end of Early Neolithic in houses made of interwoven brushwood, plastered with soil and mud, details of oval and round vessels decorated by impressed shell rims or strings of simple pricks. Stone tools, like small knives, scrapers, scratchers of semiquartz were produced here as well. Travel writers and humanists Pietro Coppo, Prospero Petronio, Gian Rinaldo Carli and Pietro Kandler mention the monumental ruins on Ižula, later referred to as Isola del vescovo - Bishop's Island in land register maps. All the authors agree on the location and description of this exten­sive historical-archaeological building zone 50 acres large.

The area is today on firm land with only a part sunk in the sea as the sea borderline moved about 2 mm each year. The Roman building complexes indicate that there was a residen­tial object in the western part of the island, and several economic-processing edifices, warehouses and other port edi­fices on the southern and southeastern part of the island. Large mosaic surfaces, walls with fresco paintings, parts of a thermal complex, water cistern, supply and drainage pipes, finds of sculpture fragments and coins, together with the phases of building and reconstruction of the edifices date this site in the period between the 1st and the 4th century AD" ((Kristina Džin, Catalogue n° 58, Archaeological Museum of Istria, Pula 2000., 8)

"Coins are often found in both cremation and inhumation graves, mostly by the head or in the hand of the deceased." (Kristina Džin, Catalogue n° 58, Archaeological Museum of Istria, Pula 2000., 14)

Remainders of drain Roman