Stories from Antiquity
About the project
Twenty reliefs made from recycled coffee. Each one tells a story from our antiquity. The colours are in truth the lessons each of those stories carries...
... It all began over a cup of coffee and one question: why throw away the grounds...
... The idea of turning grounds into objects and fertiliser won Climathon 2023. The support of the RISE programme and EIT Jumpstarter helped us open the 3DEA workshop...
... One relief needs the grounds of ten coffees. What would end up as rubbish here takes shape and a story...
... The project ‘XX Boja Kafe Crnogorske Antike’ was supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media of Montenegro.
Teuta
Teuta was an Illyrian queen, the widow of King Agron, ruling in the name of his young son...
... She allowed her captains to plunder ships across the Adriatic without asking whose they were...
... When a Roman envoy rebuked her for it, she ordered him killed, and so the First Illyrian War began...
... Within two years the Romans forced her to admit defeat and pay tribute...
... Legend says she leapt from the cliff above Risan rather than walk in a Roman procession...
... Pride without a plan easily ends on a cliff, but freedom was worth more than life to some.
Demetrius of Pharos
Demetrius was Teuta’s governor on the island of Pharos, today’s Hvar...
... When he was slandered at court, he handed the island over to the Romans before they had even attacked...
... After the Romans soon pushed him out, he fled to the Macedonian court...
... He always kept boats ready for flight, and the sources do not agree on his death...
... Not a single inscription bearing his name survives anywhere on Hvar...
... Who keeps changing sides is remembered only for betrayal.
Agron
Agron was king of the Ardiaei, a people who lived from Herzegovina and the Boka to Lake Scutari...
... Out of that people he built a state stretching from the Neretva to the island of Corfu...
... He had fast warships, lembi, and with a fleet of a hundred lembi he crushed the Aetolians near the city of Medion...
... After the victory he celebrated with wine for days, caught pneumonia and died a few days later...
... His son Pinnes was still a child then, so Teuta took power...
... The most dangerous moment is when you think everything comes easily to you.
Bardylis
Bardylis was an Illyrian leader Cicero calls a brigand, not a king...
... Tradition says he began as a charcoal burner, not on a throne...
... For forty years he held the Illyrians together...
... He shared the plunder into equal parts, and that is why his warriors trusted him...
... In his ninetieth year he still rode into battle against Philip the Second, Alexander’s father...
... Power is not held by birth but by an honest scale.
Cleitus
Cleitus was the son of the Dardanian king Bardylis...
... His father had earlier lost to Philip, and he was looking for a chance at revenge...
... When Philip the Second died, he thought the young Alexander an easy target and marched on Macedonia...
... Before the battle of Pelion he sacrificed three rams, three boys and three girls to appease the gods of war...
... That very night Alexander surrounded his camp and destroyed it...
... Who sacrifices those who come after them does not win but loses the future.
Gentius
Gentius was the last Illyrian king and ruled from Scodra...
... He minted his own coins and fostered trade, and in Latin the gentian is called Gentiana after him...
... He had a fleet of lembi, and at sea he troubled the Romans...
... He had his own brother Plator killed to take his betrothed from him...
... The Romans needed only a month to break him, and his life ended in chains in Iguvium...
... In the end it was not Roman power that destroyed him, but his own temper.
Etuta
Etuta was the daughter of the Dardanian king Monunius and the wife of King Gentius...
... Gentius killed his own brother for her, reckoning it would bind the Dardanian people to him...
... The reckoning failed, and a Roman officer captured Etuta with her sons at Meteon, today’s Medun...
... A year later she walked ahead of the triumphal chariots through Rome, and she died in Iguvium...
... Of her life before that almost nothing is known...
... Who does not tell their own story is written down only in other people’s sentences.
Diocletian
Diocletian was the son of a slave from Salona, today’s Split...
... Thanks to his skill as a soldier he rose through the Roman army, and the soldiers proclaimed him emperor...
... He divided power among four rulers so the vast state could be held more easily...
... He called himself Iovius, Jupiter’s, and so he remains remembered as the great persecutor of Christians...
... He built his palace in Split, close to the place he had come from...
... The road from slave to emperor shows that where you come from does not decide how far you can go.
Vidasus
Vidasus is the Illyrian god of the forest and of shepherds, whom the Romans equated with Silvanus...
... His name probably comes from the Indo-European root for wood and forest...
... No written myth of his survives, only hundreds of small votive monuments across Roman Dalmatia...
... Shepherds, peasants and soldiers dedicated them, and legend says he wakes in spring, when the flocks are led out to pasture...
... When the Illyrian kings reached the summit they chose Jupiter and Hercules, and Vidasus stayed the god of ordinary people...
... What ordinary people hold lasts longer than what emperors hold.
Cadmus and Harmonia
Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and his wife Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, came to our shores at the end of their lives...
... Worn out by the misfortunes that had struck their family, they asked the gods to turn them into serpents...
... The serpent in myth is a symbol of renewal, immortality and the return to the earth from which everything came...
... From that transformation was born a son, Illyrius, after whom the Illyrians took their name...
... From them descend the Enchelei too, a people whose name means eels, who lived between the Adriatic and Lake Ohrid...
... The new is born only when the old shape is cast off.
Alexander
Alexander of Macedon led his army from the front ranks, and in temperament he was like stone...
... He believed he was a god on earth, and in the Oasis of Siwa he accepted the title of son of the god Amun...
... After conquering Persia he took up Persian customs so the local nobility would accept him...
... On coins he was shown with a rayed crown and a gaze towards the sky, and those motifs would later shape the images of the god Mithras...
... He saw himself as a unifier of humankind, and he turned the story of taming Bucephalus into a myth of his own...
... Who makes stone of themselves must live like stone.