The Temple of Augustus in Pula

The building in the center of attention of any person in the main city square is the Temple of Augustus, which is completely preserved sacral monument. The temple was dedicated to Roma and Emperor Augustus, and is most probably built in the 1^st decade of the 1^st century AD. During the Middle Ages, the temple had secular purpose. It was used for grain storage, and supposedly it was also the home to the Christian church for a short amount of time. On the wall of the temple, from the inside and the outside, there are many visible damages, which were cause by putting in the new windows, reordering the building into three floors, and fire which in several occasions ruined the roof construction. During World War II, the temple was directly hit with and airplane bomb, which dispersed among the pillars, and almost ruined it to the ground. Italian archaeologists have rebuilt and reconstructed it during the two-year military ruling of the city (1945-1947). The structure is built in the shape of a simple parallelogram with front porch which is built on four pillars. Four smooth pillars of the front portico, and one on each side, end with classic capitals in Corinthian style, and they all confirm that the temple was built in the time of Augustus, as were the whole Forum.

The Temple of Augustus had a twin. Identical building was built on the other corner of the northern part of the Forum, but only the frontend is preserved, while everything else is now part of the communal palace, starting from the Middle Ages. Its symmetry was probably completed with the central temple of the Capitolinum Trinity, the third temple which was probably dedicated to the official gods of the Empire. Complete loss of this temple is ascribed to the hatred of the first Christians towards pagan temples after the 4^th century. Even though today, the Temple of Roma and Augustus is in the state it was before the bombing, it still ruined a large piece of the inscription on the corona above the pillars in the facade, which had inscribed that the temple was dedicated to “the goddess Roma (personification of Rome) and the Emperor Augustus, son of divine Caesar, the father of the homeland”.

The inscription was very significant, because it set the date of construction before the death of Augustus, which is before 14 AD, but after 2 BC, when he received from the senate honorary title “Father of the homeland” (pater patriae). Thus the temple is probably built between these two years. The temple of Augustus is one of the finest examples of the architecture of the early Empire.

RECOMMENDED TOURS & EXCURSIONS Best tours & things to do in Pula hand-picked by insiders