Cleaning of locality St. Martin, Ivinj – volunteer action full of new knowledge.
We spent last Saturday at the archaeological site of St. Martin on Ivin. The occasion of Saturday’s gathering was a volunteer action to clean the archaeological site, which was carried out by the Argonaut association in cooperation with the Tisno Municipality and the Murter Eco-patrol, as part of the project “From the Argonaut to Tisno”.
Despite that it was already the second half of the month and a storm blew just on Saturday morning, a dozen volunteers took part in the action. Most of the volunteers were members of Murter Eco Patrol. With our arrival on the location, we saw the success of the action – the children were impressed by the building they saw. “I’m here for the first time! What is this church? Why are these walls here? Who built them? ” the children were asking. In order to provide first-hand information to the children, we called on our archaeologist Magu Zorić, who cares for this archaeological site.
In the first place, the children learned about archaeology and what archaeologists do, and then their archaeologic mentor Zoric told them the story for the Roman villa, carried them through the walls, and showed some parts of the villa, an early Christian basilica, told them about the church of St. Martin. The children were had a lot of questions and wondered-does there such a building exist in this place?
When children learned how worth this area is, they invested more effort in cleaning the weed site. The volunteers cleaned the soil of a Roman villa covered with pebbles and the weed that grows from the walls of the villa, did not come to the archaeologist’s instructions.
The area of Ivin is especially valuable due to Roman villas, but the whole ecosystem of this area is special. What are the specialties of the water flowing in vicinity, what is the density of the sea, the sparkling waters and Dead Sea, and what is this peloid mud, patrols were explained by their leader Ivan. Interesting experiments on water density and jigsaws on healing mud were fun for us, but they also learned a lot of new things.
We believe that this action is a step towards raising awareness of the local community about the value of this site and its valorisation. Saturday we had learned a lot of new knowledge about the cultural and natural heritage and at the end, we are happy and hopefully we will meet again there, maybe at some event!