East Coast of Istria
Where the green hills meet the sea, where the nature and heritage combine, there is a paradise for artists, there is the eastern coast of Istria.
The eastern coast of Istria is 202,6 km long (with the pertaining islets even 212,4 km).
The northern part of the east coast (the so-called Liburnija, or cities of Brsec, Lovran, Opatija, Volosko, Matulji, Kastav) and the western part of the Kvarner bay, gravitate to Rijeka, so when creating the county in 1993 that part of Istria administratively assigned to Primorje-Gorski Kotar.
With Labin and Rabac surroundings, under the eastern coast of Istria are also Barban and Marčana.
According to the written sources, the Slavs came in Barban at the end of the 6th century. That medieval town, suffering various wars and battles with Venetians, comes under the authority of the family Loredan which has bought it for only five and a half thousand Venetian ducats. Family Loredan constantly suppressed the farmers and created new social strata which a wealthy Croats joined also. Farmers who did not pay regular income were taken for several years to prison, and they were not allowed to talk abouth it. They were also slaves to the Venetian galleys that were anchored in the Gulf of Raša. The French, after a short time, took rouling in Barban, and Petar Stanković abolished feudal relations. But that did not last long because the Venice took over the reign again. The people fled to Yugoslavia, including Mijo Mirkovic (known under the pseudonym Mate Balota) and Tone Peruško. Peter Stankovic was an intellectual and writer of many books in Italian and in Croatian, dealt with all sorts of things, from religious life to the cultivation of fruit trees, and has remained one of the major creators of Istria from the 19th century.
After the Romans conquered the Histri in the year 177 BC and after exhausting battle won Nezakcij, they introduced a new division of conquered land to the Centuries. It was named after the Roman hamlet of Marciana belonging to the family of Marcia.
The stone artifacts that were found in Marčana indicate that there were created villas Rusticae, farms with luxurious stone building decoration. A vast arable land has contributed to the dense settling of Marcana which is testified by several sites with the remains of Roman villas near Pinezić.
The first written mention of Marčana dates from the year 1243. in a document by which many dignitaries, swear allegiance to the Venetian Republic. Village Marčana in the Middle Ages has shared the same fate of the southern Istrian places in which in the 13th, 14th, 15th, and in the first half of the 16th century happened cataclysmic calamities (war destruction, infectious epidemic, leaving unprotected rural settlements, the vulnerability of the city center) .
In the 16th century, after the terrible plague in 1527 that has devastated Pula and its area, followed several attempts to colonize Marčana.
Marčana, until the collapse of the Venetian Republic in 1797, shared the fate of other places along the southwestern coast of Istria: epidemics, invasions of the Turks, the Venetian exploitation in the form of various benefits for the church repairs, keeping the walls, paying capitation ...
In the year 1797. Napoleon Bonaparte gives the Venetian properties in Istria to Austria, but already in the 1805. Istria falls under the rule of the Kingdom of Italy. At 1814, these areas have been re-occupied from Austria and that will remain so until the beginning of the First World War.