Два средњобосанска топонима : Солун, Лабун и топографски динамизам римске Далмације

Abstract

The present paper deals with two place names near the small town of Olovo, situated in the Bosna river basin some 30 miles northeast from Sarajevo, at a distance of about 10 miles between them: Solun and Labun. Historically, both of them designated villages; the former still exists, whereas today there 1s only a hill named Labun on the site of the former settlement. The toponym Solun coincides with the Slavic name of the Macedonian metropolis Salonica, which prima facie suggests the supposition that the Bosnian village was named, for reason unknown, after one of the most famous cities of the Balkans. It may have happened during the Middle Ages or even in the early days of Turkish rule, for the first mention of the village Solun goes back only to 1604. However, our written sources for the historical geography of Bosnia are too scarce to exclude the possibility that this name is considerably older on the spot than its first record. Moreover, there are some problems in deriving the Slavic form Solun, recorded since the 9th century, from Greek Thessalonike, which involve another place name, that of the capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia, Salona. It has been supposed that the ancient Slavs, coming from the north of Europe to the Balkans, confused with each other the names of two Balkan province capitals and transferred their phonetically regular reflex of the name Salona (Latin a > Slavic o, Latin o > Slavic u) to Salonica. The place name Salona survives as Solin, a small town near Split, with the phonetic development presupposing the change on > un in Vulgar Latin, whereas Solun is directly derivable from Salona (both forms implying a weakening of the vowel auslaut). Consequently, if the place name So/un in Bosnia remains suspect of being transplanted from elsewhere, its point of origin was not necessarily on the Aegean, but perhaps, and even more probably, on the Adriatic coast.

The place name Labun, documented since 1468/9, has its parallels in Slavic toponymy, Laboun in Czechia and Labunista in Macedonia, both derivable from the nickname *Labunv ‘boozer’, the former as a j-possessive, the latter as a patronymic in *-itji. However, to trace Labun back to the same Slavic etymon is hard in view of its apparently underived form. On the other hand, there is not only geographical but also

a structural closeness between Solun and Labun suggesting that the latter as well might reflect one of those Pre-Roman place names in -ona that are so characteristic of the ancient Dalmatia. A plausible candidate is provided by Albona, which, in the littoral, resulted in Slavic Labin, with the same development of the penult as in Solin < Salona, Skradin < Scardona, Stupin < Stelpona, Norin < Narona, etc.; here, beside the regular liquida-metathesis, the direct substitution of 0 by Slavic u would have taken place, just as in the case of Solun < Salona.

The ancient A/bona, today Labin on the eastern coast of the Istrian peninsula, lay far from Salona on the northwestern border of Liburnia. However, there was another Albona, in Dalmatia, near Salona. It is recorded only in a charter from 1078, but its Slavic reflex, which is, here too, Labin, implies an early (before the 10** century) adaptation of the obviously Pre-Slavic name. The distance between Solin and Labin in the neighbourhood of Split 1s approximately the same as that between Solun and Labun in Bosnia. Thus we find something that we may call a pair of toponyms copied from the Dalmatian coast to the deep inland of the Roman province. Rather than explained as a pure linguistic phenomenon based on a kinship between the Pre-Roman idioms of two regions, such a mirroring may be interpreted as a trace of an early migration. Moreover, we can place this assumption within a precise historical frame. From literary and epigraphic sources we know of forced resettlements which took place in Dalmatia under Roman rule. During the 1S century A.D. the Romans relocated several native communities of the Delmatians from the littoral into the mining districts laying in the eastern part of the province, and in 24 century the recently conquered Dacia with its gold resources became a new destination for Delmatian miners. There is some onomastic evidence, anthroponymic as well as toponymic, reflecting those demographic processes. The settlement, which was to become a municipium, in the mining district around the modern town of Pljevlja (today NE Montenegro), was named Splonum after a small castellum of the Delmatians Splaunon situated in the hinterland of Salona. The names of other castella and tribes known from Dalmatia, such as Bariduum, Ansum, Starua, Sardeatae, Pirustae reappear around the Dacian gold mines of Transylvania. One of the early deportation of the kind affected Siculi, a fertile district on the territory of Salona, called today KaStelansko polje (‘the KaStela field’), where the village of Labin < Albona is located; after emptying the area of its indigenous population, Claudius (41-54) settled there his veterans. The therefrom deported Delmatians are listed by Pliny, under the name of Siculotae, among the tribes of the eastern Dalmatia. According to an inscription, Dolabella, the governor of the province under Tiberius (14-37), built a road leading from Salona to the upper Bosna valley, in order to pacify the local tribe of Daesitiates. This opened the way to the development of mining in the northeastern part of the province. Despite lack of evidence of the region around Olovo being mined before the late Middle Ages, as it was famed for its lead mines (olovo ‘lead’), there is nothing improbable in supposing that in Roman times it formed part of one of two neighbouring mining districts, the Mid-Bosnian in the West and that of Domavia (Argentaria, today Srebrenica) in the East. Thus, there are some reasons to consider the possibility that the colonists from Siculi on the territory of Salona — Siculotae brought with them two place names from their homeland to this remote part of Dalmatia, that of Albona, their native settlement, and that of Salona, their principal town.

If in the above presented reconstruction all pieces seem to fit together, it is nevertheless to be taken cum grano salis, for the chronological gap between the Ist century A.D., to which the names Labun and Solun near Olovo are supposed to go back, and the 15th resp. 17‘ century, as they appear for the first time in written sources. It is still possible that the latter is documented in Pre-Slavic times. On the Ptolemy’s world map from the mid 2.4 century A.D. a town in the eastern part of Dalmatia is shown named Saloniana. Apparently it was a settlement of colonists from Salona, named after the metropolis. The identification with the municipium S. near Pljevlja has been proposed, but its name proved to be most probably Splonum. The position of Saloniana on the map, west of the river Drinus (Drina), corresponds to which is today the eastern Bosnia. The derived form Salon-iana, was probably coined for administrative use, 1.e. to distinguish the new settlement from the eponymous coastal city; locally, the simple form Salona may have been used, which immediately resulted in Slavic Solun; or underlying the Slavic name is a Vulgar Latin locative *Saloniane, which was Slavicized as Solunjane and reinterpreted as an inhabitant name in -jane, wherefrom the place name Solun could be abstracted.