Mediana

Start with the ground beneath your feet. Low walls of stone and thin red brick run across the grass in neat lines, rarely higher than your knee. Some rooms are open to the sky. Others sit under a modern roof, where the light turns soft and grey. Listen for a moment. You may hear traffic on the road to the east, birdsong, and the crunch of gravel. Here, about sixteen centuries ago, emperors walked between these same walls.

This is Mediana, a late Roman residence on the eastern edge of Niš, in southern Serbia. In Roman times the city was called Naissus. It stood at an important crossroads, where roads from the Danube met roads running south toward Greece and east toward Constantinople. Armies, officials and traders passed through constantly. A wealthy suburb grew up outside the city, on the fertile plain beside the river Nišava. Mediana was the most important part of that suburb.

The name that matters most here is Constantine the Great. He was born in Naissus in the second half of the third century. He went on to become one of the most influential rulers in Roman history. He was the emperor who legalised Christianity and founded Constantinople, the city we now call Istanbul. Mediana is generally linked with his era. Most of what you see dates from the early fourth century, when Constantine and his family held power.

So what was this place? Think of it as a country estate for the imperial court. It was not a fortress and not a palace in the city. It was a spread-out complex of buildings: a grand villa, baths, storage halls, a water supply, and farmland around it. An emperor travelling between the frontier and the east could stop here in comfort. He could hold meetings, receive officials, and rest before the next stage of the journey.

The heart of the site is the main villa. Look for the open courtyard surrounded by columns. The Romans called this kind of courtyard a peristyle. It brought light and air into the house and gave residents a shaded walkway in summer. Around it were reception rooms and dining rooms. One large hall with a curved end was probably the main dining room, where guests reclined on couches in the Roman fashion.

Now look down. The floors of the villa carry some of the finest mosaics in Serbia. Thousands of small stone cubes form geometric patterns, braided bands, circles and squares. The colours are mostly warm: cream, ochre, rust red and dark grey. The original surface covers a large area. That is why a modern protective roof now stands over parts of the villa. Without it, rain and frost would slowly break the tiny stones apart.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Under some floors, you can see small brick pillars standing in rows. This is a hypocaust, the Roman system of underfloor heating. Fires burned in a furnace outside the room. Hot air flowed through the space between the pillars and warmed the floor above. In the cold Balkan winter, the people who lived here walked on warm stone. It is central heating, roughly seventeen hundred years old.

Water mattered just as much as heat. Mediana had its own baths, known in Latin as thermae, with hot, warm and cold rooms. There was also a nymphaeum, a decorative fountain area linked to water and to the nymphs of Roman belief. Pipes and channels brought water into the estate. Excavations also found a large storage building, called a horreum, where grain and other supplies were kept for the residents and their servants.

Now the second surprise. In the 1970s, archaeologists working here uncovered a group of marble sculptures. They had been carefully hidden, perhaps buried by people who feared an attack. The figures include pagan gods and mythological heroes, such as Asclepius, the god of healing. This was in a Christian emperor's world, yet the old gods still decorated the rooms. Many of these sculptures are now kept in the National Museum in Niš, not here on site.

Mediana also appears in written history. The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus recorded a famous meeting here in the year 364. Two brothers, the emperors Valentinian and Valens, stopped at Mediana, a short distance from Naissus. Here they divided the army, the officials and the court between them. One brother took the West. The other took the East. That division of power echoed through the rest of Roman history.

The good years did not last. In the fifth century, the Huns under Attila swept through the Balkans and attacked Naissus in the 440s. The suburb was devastated in this period. Later, people built on parts of the site and took stone for other uses. The villa slowly disappeared under soil and fields. For many centuries, farmers ploughed above mosaic floors without knowing what lay beneath their feet.

Today the setting tells its own story. Modern houses and roads press close to the edges of the site. The hills around Niš rise to the east, toward the spa town of Niška Banja. Walk slowly along the paths. Notice how the rooms connect, where the doorways were, and how the courtyard divides public space from private space. Read the information panels. They help you picture walls rising high above the low stone lines you see now.

Before you leave, stand still in the courtyard of the villa. Look at the bases of the old columns, and at the edges of the mosaic floor nearby. Somewhere close to here, Roman emperors ate, argued, made plans and divided an empire. Now there is grass, birdsong and the sound of cars on the road. As you walk back toward the city, remember that Constantine's Naissus lies under the streets of modern Niš, all around you.