Ulpiana, the Roman town Justinian rebuilt

A stone’s throw from Gračanica monastery, on a plain between the Graçanka river and the Drenoc hills, lie the remains of Kosovo’s most important Roman town. Ulpiana doesn’t have the grandeur of the great Mediterranean sites, but its story is first-rate, and the Kosovo Ministry of Culture’s record is detailed enough to make sense of what’s under your feet.

A Roman town between mines and roads

The Ministry places the site about 12 km south-east of Pristina, in the municipality of Graçanicë, less than 1,000 metres west of the monastery and 1.8 km by road. People lived here from the Neolithic onwards, but the town proper took shape at the end of the 1st century, a few decades after Rome conquered the kingdom of the Dardanians. Some written sources credit its founding and municipal status to Emperor Trajan, whose family name, Ulpius, would have given the town its name.

Its heyday came in the 3rd and 4th centuries, when it was known as Municipium Ulpiana Splendidissima, the splendid one. The reasons were practical. It sat beside deposits of lead, zinc, silver and gold, on fertile land and at a crossroads linking the Adriatic with the Aegean, near the Lissus-Naissus road and the road to Scupi, today’s Skopje. The Ministry relates that in 1993 lead ingots stamped Met(alli) Dard(anici) were found in the ancient harbour of Caesarea, in Israel, thought to have come from these mines.

Justiniana Secunda

In 518 an earthquake destroyed it. Emperor Justinian rebuilt it in the 6th century and renamed it Justiniana Secunda, and in that period it was an important religious centre. Pristina’s municipal leaflet tells the same story and adds that it was one of the busiest centres between Constantinople and Rome.

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What has been excavated

Over the last sixty years, according to the Ministry, archaeologists have recorded a late Roman bishop’s basilica with an octagonal baptistery, a fortified basilica with round towers, the north and west cemeteries, the town wall with towers and a gate, a Roman military camp, a pagan temple with a portico, remains of baths, a stretch of the main street and the drain. The walls enclosed 35.5 hectares, the camp covered another 16 about 100 metres from the east wall, and with its suburbs the town reached around 120.

I’m giving you the detail because on the ground you’ll see low walls among the grass. Without that mental map, Ulpiana can look like very little; with it, you grasp the scale.

The archaeological park

On 24 October 2016 the Ministry of Culture signed the regulation creating the Ulpiana archaeological park, with a perimeter of 161.10 hectares and a buffer zone of 96.23. The site has permanent protection and, according to the record, visitor infrastructure is being developed. There are no published opening hours or prices, so I’d go in the morning and pair it with Gračanica monastery.

Both are in the municipality of Gračanica and make up the first of my day trips from Pristina. If Roman Kosovo interests you, the wider background is in the history of Kosovo.

If you are short on time, see the best tours in Ulpiana and pick one that fits your day.

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