History
The site of a Bronze Age prehistoric hill fort, human remains have been found on the site that date back approximately 3,400-4,000 years back. The name Barban appears for the first time in an ecclesiastic document dated 740 A.D. In the Middle Ages, the town was fortified while under control of feudal lords from Pazin, and parts of those medieval fortifications can still be seen. In the second half of the 13th century, having been depopulated by the plague in 1312, a small colony of Dalmatians from Finodol settled in the area, brought by the counts of Gorizia.
In 1374, upon the death of Albert IV, Count of Pazin, it became a full Habsburg possession, before being taken over by the Republic of Venice in the 16th century. In 1534, Venice ceded it to the Loredan family as a heritable possession.
In the main square, which is reached by passing through Velika Vrata (the Great Gate, 1718), stands the St. Nicholas parish church with baroque altars and paintings by Venetian masters from the 16th-18th centuries, a Late Gothic stone tabernacle, and wooden baroque sculptures.
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)