Argentaria: Srebrenica in the Roman Empire

 

Srebrenica, 2002. photo by Tarik Samarah

In the late 1800s Austrian geologists and mining experts traveled to Srebrenica, then a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, in order to map out and utilize the region’s silver mines. Along with substantial reserve of natural resources, the geologists discovered the remnants of the ancient Roman settlement of Argentaria, whose name is derived from the Latin word for silver. 

Around the first century A.D., Roman soldiers conquered the Balkans, incorporating the region into the vast Roman Empire. The Illyrian tribes living in the Balkans at the time eventually became Romanized, began dressing, eating and worshipping as the Romans did, and Latin became the language of the land. Romanization occurred with particular intensity in Bosnia as a result of Rome sending a large number of Latin speaking Romans to permanently settle there. A large percentage of the settlers were retired or injured soldiers sent to Bosnia because of the region’s spas and thermal waters, believed to have therapeutic benefits.

As a result of the large Roman influence, many Bosnian towns were indistinguishable in their layout from towns in other parts of the empire. One of the most important of these towns was Argentaria’s urban settlement, Domavia, whose name derives from the Latin word for “coming home.”

The town of Domavia included a tile industrial center, a bath and a Roman senate house. Further signs of Romanization could be found in the form of bronze statues and pottery, discovered by archeologists in the 1890s.

What distinguished Domavia from other Romanized Bosnian towns was its location as the headquarters of the mining administrative center for the Roman provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia (roughly the present day Balkan region). As a result, Domavia was the most important town in Roman Bosnia.

Almost as soon as they settled in the region, the Romans began to develop and exploit Bosnia’s vast mineral wealth. Bosnia is a country of rivers, and the river valleys are rich in mineral wealth: gold, iron, and especially along the Drina, silver. Some of the richest silver mines in the region were found in Argentaria. Argentaria was best known for the production of silver coins, day after day the slaves-mostly prisoners of war, would come from the Villa Rusticas (slave homes-another example of the region’s Romanization) to work the mines where they would mine, smelt and transport the silver across the Drina to be used as coins throughout the empire. By the fourth century Argentaria was the wealthiest region in the Balkans

Argentaria’s wealth could not have been achieved without the network of Roman built trade routes and roads to transport the silver. Located on a strategic spot near the Drina River, caravans of traders with their pack animals would stop in Argentaria to trade their goods. The main road ran north through the Roman fortress town of Ad Drium (Zvornik); connecting Argentaria with Sirmium (Sremska Mitovica); the one time imperial capital of the Roman Empire.