was the largest and most important city of Dalmatia, with 40,000 inhabitants. Nearby, the Emperor Diocletian, who was born in Salona, built his retirement palace (in approx 300 AD), one of the largest and most important monuments of late antique architecture. On its pathways, cellars, domes, mausoleums, arcades and courtyards can be seen numerous different art influences from the entire Empire. Some of the sculptures are: the head of a boy, girl and a woman from Salona, monumental figure of Minerva from Varaždin, the head of Hercules from Sinj, sculptures of Roman emperors from Nin and Vid near Metković, damaged sculpture of emperor in Zagreb Museum etc. In the 4th century Salona became the centre of Christianity for the entire western Balkans. It had numerous basilicas and necropolises, and even two saints: Domnius (Duje) and Anastasius (Staš). One of the few preserved basilicas in western Europe from the time of early Byzantium is the Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč from the 6th century. The early Middle Ages brought the great migration of the Slavs and this period was perhaps a Dark Age in the cultural sense until the successful formation of the Slavic states which coexisted with Italic cities that remained on the coast, each of them were modelled like Venice. Medieval Croatian art Early Middle Ages In the 7th century the Croats, with other Slavs and Avars, came from Eastern Europe to the area of the former Roman provinces of Pannonia, Dalmatia and Istria where they live up to the present day. The Croats were an Iron Age nomadic culture, so avoiding the urban centres they instead settled in the countryside around the Roman cities, for example on an island in the river Jadro near Roman Salona. During the 7th and 8th centuries there was a trend of constructing smaller buildings from the material and decorative elements of ruined older Roman buildings. During the 9th century, parallel with the establishment of Croatian principalities, new architecture of pre-Romanesque characteristics emerged. It was based on numerous influences of which the Frankish and Byzantine were the strongest. Gradually those inherited influences evolved into a more original form of architecture. Altar screens and carved stone windows in those churches were decorated with the shallow interweaving ornamentation which we call Croatian interlace. In general, the appearance of interlace reliefs in a building indicates a date before 1100. Motifs of this interlace are often of classical