Two kilometres south of Novalja, the road bends around a wide, shallow cove where the water goes glassy in the late afternoon and a handful of stone houses sit under the hill. It looks like nothing much — a quiet beach, a few boats, some sheep. But Caska is the most archaeologically dense square kilometre on the island of Pag, and the reason islanders have told the same story here for centuries: that a whole Roman city lies under this bay.
Cissa: the town that gave the island its name
The Roman settlement here was called Cissa, and it was important enough that its name was used for the whole island until the 14th century. The modern name Caska is simply Cissa worn smooth by two thousand years of local speech. In Roman times this was a working landscape: country estates, storage cellars, workshops, a harbour, and the fields that fed them — with Novalja, whose name comes from the Latin navalia (a place for sheltering and repairing ships), serving as the port on the other side of the ridge.
The legend — and what the archaeologists actually found
The old Novalja story goes like this. The city of Kisa had grown rich and corrupt, so God sent an angel to look for a single good person in it. The angel found Bona, the good sister of the wicked Mala, and told her to run. As she fled, the earth shook and the city vanished into the sea forever.
It is a wonderful story, and it is worth knowing that the science tells a slower, stranger version. Excavation and geological work in Caska has not turned up evidence of a single catastrophic event. Instead, the ruins now lying underwater are explained by the sea level rising gradually and continuously over many centuries — the Adriatic did not swallow Cissa in one night, it simply crept up on it. The result looks the same from a kayak: walls and structures that run straight off the beach and keep going under the surface.
Roman estates, a senator’s daughter and a wall along the shore
In the northern part of the cove, archaeologists investigated the storage areas of Roman villas covering roughly 320 square metres — two partly walled-off cellars dug about 2.4 metres down. They started as food stores and ended their life as rubbish pits, packed with broken pottery, animal bones and other organic remains. A coin from the 1st century BC found at the bottom of one cellar hints at when the first building went up.
Somewhere in this bay stood the estate of the Calpurnii Pisones, one of Rome’s leading senatorial families. We know because of three sacrificial altars raised by Calpurnia — daughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, consul in 1 BC, and granddaughter of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, consul in 23 BC. One of those altars is now in the Town Museum in Novalja; another still stands in a private yard in Caska. Roman senators, in other words, summered on Pag long before anyone thought of Zrće.
The most visible thing you can walk past today is the run of massive walls following the coastline on the eastern side of the cove, between the old tuna-spotting tower known as Tunera (or Turan) and a spot locals call Pod bužu. Nobody agrees on what they were: retaining walls against landslides and erosion, or the town walls themselves. Either way, the Romans invested serious effort in holding on to this shoreline.
What lies under the water
Systematic underwater research in Caska began in 2005, and it has delivered the bay’s best finds. In front of the Kaštela ruins and the little church of St Anthony, in the northern part of the cove, lie the sunken remains of a breakwater some twenty metres long, built as a bank of crushed rock to shelter the cove from southerly winds. Near it, in that first season, divers recovered an almost completely preserved wooden anchor from Roman times — the muddy, oxygen-poor seabed had kept the timber intact for nearly two millennia.
Then, in 2007, came the sewn boat. In the small inlet of Mala pošta, south of Tunera, archaeologists found the remains of a roughly eight-metre vessel built with an old Mediterranean technique in which the planks are literally stitched together with plant-fibre cord and sealed with resin. It had been deliberately filled with broken stone and mortar and sunk, most likely as part of a dock structure, with wooden stakes driven around and through it. An iron axe with its wooden handle still attached was lying nearby. The finds date the boat to the 2nd century AD.
The anchor and a model of the sewn ship are on display in the Town Museum in Novalja, along with material from the Roman cemetery excavated at the end of the bay between 2003 and 2007, where 44 cremation graves and one skeletal grave were uncovered — built in a manner not recorded at any other site.
Climb Sveti Juraj for the view
Above the cove rises the hill of Sveti Juraj, crowned with the remains of a fort that may go back to late antiquity — possibly the 6th century, in the time of the Byzantine emperor Justinian and his wars against the Ostrogoths. It was rectangular, and a small church of St George was built into its south-eastern corner; the church you see today probably dates from the 14th century, quite possibly standing on something older. Excavation here uncovered the grave of a girl buried with rich jewellery, now being studied at the Archaeological Museum in Zadar.
The hill is not high and the climb is manageable for most people, but it is steep and the karst underfoot is loose and sharp — proper shoes, not flip-flops, and take water. The reward is the whole of Pag bay laid out beneath you.
How to visit Caska
- Getting there: take the road out of Novalja towards the Žigljen–Prizna ferry and turn off towards Barbati, Caska, Vidalići, Zubovići, Kustići and Metajna. It is about 2 km from Novalja — easy by car, scooter or bike.
- Make a day of it: Caska is also a lovely, quiet pebble-and-shingle beach, so bring a towel. Come for the swim, walk the shoreline for the walls, climb Sveti Juraj in the cooler hours.
- See the finds first: the Town Museum in Novalja holds the wooden anchor, the sewn-ship model, one Calpurnia altar and cemetery material. Half an hour there makes the bay read completely differently.
- Leave everything where it is: this is protected archaeological heritage, on land and underwater. Look, photograph, don’t collect.
Caska is the sort of place that rewards slowing down. There is no ticket office, no signposted trail, no crowd — just a bay where a Roman town, a medieval fort and a 19th-century tuna tower all sit within a ten-minute walk of the water. Simple experience of joy, with two thousand years underneath it.
