Do you remember a tale about Argonauts?
It describes a pursuit of a boat Argo and a stolen golden fleece. The subjects of the king of Kolhida gave up the pursuit after their king´son had died.For fear they should be punished for the prince´s death and the failure of the pursuit if they returned to Kolhida they had decided to settle down in the place where had died.
The most famous geographer in the ancient world Strabo - affirms that in this way Pula was founded.
According to this legend, Pula was founded about 3,000 years ago.


The Illyrian Pula - then but a "spring of living water" - merely vegetated in the shadow of Nesactium, the nearby dominant political, administrative, military and religious centre.

The arrival of the Roman legions in 177 BC, which imposed a new rule that resulted in intensive colonisation and the creation of both a commercial centre and military encampment, by 40 BC had elevated the city to the status of a colony.
With Augustus it become the divine town, "pleasure of the rich, happiness to the middle class"...


From the mid-twelfth century,Pula swore an oath of allegiance to the Queen of the Seas, accepting the status of a vassal state, paying tributes, building and fitting out gallons, participating in wars, pursuing and capturing "sea-pirates plying the waters between Medulin and Rovinj" and handing them over to the Venetian authorities.

In those past centuries, Pula became a typical medieval town, in Romanesque-Gothic style. Actually, the city palace is Romanesque- Gothic- Renaissance, built on the remains of a Roman temple of the goddess Diana, which speaks most eloquently of the passage of time and changing influences.Many famous artists of their time visited Pula and left traces of Pula in their work, to name the most famous: Michelangelo and Dante.
Over the years Pula was gradually devastated.  Coupled with epidemics of plague and malaria, from a developed city, Pula was a place with 600 souls at the time of the Venetian fall. In 1799 the Venetian part of the Istrian peninsula was handed over to Austria (which already had the rest of Istria).
Austria decided in 1853, to establish Pula as its main naval port of the Hapsburg monarchy.

This period saw the transformation of a small city with fading antique splendour to an industrial port with a newly formed and growing working blue collar class.
The rate of population growth was considerable: in 1842 Pula had 1,126 inhabitants, by 1857 that number had increased seven-fold, and by the end of the century the population had risen to 40,000.

The Second World War was to draw Pula into dramatic maelstrom:the town suffered bombardment and destruction, although the defeated forces were ultimately subjected to harsh reprisals.

After the war, further result was a repeat of one of those long-term periods of "historic stagnation", a process which has endured up until the dramatic days of our most recent history and the present days.