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A mystery lies hidden deep in the turquoise waters off Rovinj.

There was once a city named Cissa somewhere along this part of the Istrian coast. The great Roman geographer Pliny the Elder mentioned the city in the first century CE. We know that Cissa was famed in the heyday of the Roman Empire for producing fine purple dyes that could be used on the emperors’ regal garments.

Today, Cissa is a lost city: no one knows where it was located. The people of Rovinj think they know, however. For centuries the fishermen of this area have told a story that Cissa once existed on a peninsula jutting off the mainland. But then disaster struck. The stories don’t tell us the exact year, but they do tell us the exact date: on 16 September, sometime between the fourth and eighth centuries, a catastrophic earthquake shook Istria.

This date is the feast day of St. Eufemija, the patron saint of Rovinj. When that earthquake struck, it leveled Cissa, plunging the once-prosperous city into the sea. The peninsula on which the city sat fragmented into several islands that still exist today, such as St. Andrija. Those of the population who were able to escape founded nearby the city that then became Rovinj.

For more than a millennium, the history of Cissa, like its very stones, faded from view. It wasn’t until a nineteenth-century historian named Pietro Kandler tried to sort myth from legend that modern scholars became interested in those old fishermen’s stories. Talking to the locals, Kandler learned that there was a certain spot, not too far offshore, where their fishing nets would frequently get caught on something deep in the water, and when they pulled them up, the men’s nets would often be torn.

Could they have been sailing right over the lost city, all this time? Kandler concluded that he had identified the location of ancient Cissa. He even left directions for how to find it. Standing at the top of the bell tower of St. Eufemija’s church, on the highest hill in Rovinj, he said that between the island of St. Ivan and a smaller islet the sunken city must rest. Kandler, however, had no way of exploring the depths.

It wasn’t until several decades later that an Austro-Hungarian investigative team set out to see if Kandler was right. And they had the technology he lacked: a diver in a heavy suit and cumbersome copper helmet dropped down into the water in search of the Istrian Atlantis. No one expected what he found. Walls. Ancient city walls. He was sure of it, he said: he had once been a mason, the diver insisted, and the stones he had seen in the depths had unquestionably been the work of men. The diver wasn’t able to explore fully, though, because of the depth and the limitations of his equipment.

Since that time no one has been able to establish with absolute certainty that the ruins of Cissa lie there beneath the ocean so close to Rovinj. In fact, there seems to be no hard proof that Cissa ever existed precisely on this coast at all. So the story of the Istrian Atlantis may not actually be true.

But if it isn’t, then why, throughout all these centuries, have the fishermen kept bringing up in their nets ancient bricks, and tiles, and amphorae?

Historians in centuries past used to be obsessed with how places got their names. In order to understand a place, it was often thought, you have to begin with the name. The problem is, usually you can never know where the names come from - sometimes they go way back into the fog of antiquity. But I’ll begin this blog where historians of ages past might have begun, namely with names.

That troublesome “antiquity fog” has definitely fallen over much of the eastern Adriatic. There are very few written sources before Classical times that tell us anything about this araea. However, we do think we know where some of the most important names originated. And that’s where the barbarians come in.

Some of the earliest settlers we know about in the eastern Adriatic were the Illyrians. This is a group of people who came to what’s today Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and elsewhere in the Balkans roughly during the Bronze Age. They weren’t Slavs. In fact, there may never even have been a cohesive group that understood themselves as “Illyrians.”

However, there were definitely some different tribes that lived in particular areas. The Greeks, and later the Romans, came into contact with these tribes. And the names that the Greeks used for these tribes began to be used for the areas where those tribes lived.

So in the northeastern part of the Adriatic you had the Histris tribe. From there we get the modern-day name of Istria. Farther south lived the Delmatae - and hence “Dalmatia.” It’s even thought that some of the geographical names we still use come down from these ancient tribesmen, via the Greeks’ recording of the names. For instance, today’s river Krka in Croatia comes from the name Greek geographers gave it, the Katarbates, which they might well have gotten from the Illyrian tribesmen lounging around its banks. Likewise, today’s island of Mljet the Greeks called “Melita,” which may be a corruption of the Illyrian word.

What do we conclude from all this? The Eastern Adriatic has been inhabited for a very long time, and if the barbarians are long gone - most of them, anyway - some of their names are immortalized forever.

Want to know more about the Illyrians? Get barbaric to your heart’s content at http://www.ancientillyrians.com

That peninsula is Istria. Anybody see any barbarians?