Poreč

The basilica was built in the sixth century and the mosaics were made while Justinian ruled Byzantium and Ravenna was still the western capital of an empire that believed it would last forever. I stood in the apse and looked at the Virgin in the conch above the altar — enthroned, direct, haloed in gold on a gold ground — and tried to calculate how many people had stood in exactly this spot, in this same quality of amber light, over the last fifteen hundred years. The calculation was impossible and also beside the point. What mattered was the quality of the stillness, which was different from ordinary silence in a way I couldn’t immediately explain.

Poreč sits on a small peninsula on Istria’s western coast, and it is, by high summer, one of the most crowded spots on the Adriatic. The marina fills, the waterfront restaurants run at capacity, the ferries to the offshore islands carry standing passengers. But Poreč was here long before the hotels and it will be here long after — the Roman cardo and decumanus are still the main streets of the old town, walked now by tourists rather than legionnaires but otherwise recognisably the same grid that Colonia Julia Parentium laid out two thousand years ago.

The Euphrasian Basilica is a UNESCO World Heritage site and, despite that designation or perhaps because of it, routinely underestimated. The complex includes an atrium, a baptistery, the bishop’s palace, and the basilica itself — all built by Bishop Euphrasius in the 540s over an earlier church and retaining most of the original decorative programme. The mosaics cover the triumphal arch and the main apse, and they are Ravenna-quality work: gold tesserae, lapis lazuli blues, the particular hyper-real stylisation of Byzantine sacred art where the figures are simultaneously flat and electric. I watched visitors spend more time photographing them than looking at them, and understood the impulse while finding it slightly sad.

The waterfront outside the basilica leads in both directions: north toward the marina and the modern hotel strips, south toward quieter residential streets and the smaller quay where the local fishing boats tie up. In summer the boat connections to the Poreč islands — particularly Sveti Nikola, the pine-forested island directly across the bay — run hourly and are worth the short crossing for a swim in cleaner water than the town beaches offer. The island has one restaurant, no cars, and the particular peace of a place accessible only by water.

I ate at a konoba away from the waterfront one evening — a place off the cardo with four tables and a handwritten menu that changed daily. The chef appeared to be also the waiter, and the pasta with cuttlefish ink and local clams was as good as anything I’d eaten on the coast. The wine was a local Malvazija, barely chilled, served in a carafe without ceremony. Poreč is easy to write off as a resort town, and in July it comes close to deserving that. But the basilica and the Roman street plan underneath everything are always there, surviving the season.

When to go: May and early June before the summer crowds arrive is ideal — the sea is cool but swimmable, the basilica has room to breathe, and the old town functions as a town rather than a theme park. September is the second window: warmth and water remain, crowds have mostly left, and the ferry to Sveti Nikola still runs. Winter is empty but the basilica is always open and worth a pilgrimage even in December.