Dardania: where the name comes from

The people of the Dardanians

The Dardanians, Dardani in Latin, were one of the peoples who lived in the Balkans long before the Romans arrived. Their land lay in the centre of the peninsula: in the basins of today's Kosovo, along the upper Morava and around Skopje. Rivers and passes connected it with the Adriatic in the west and with Macedonia and Thrace in the south and east.

Greek and Roman writers describe the Dardanians as tough, numerous and hard to subdue. The geographer Strabo counted them among the three strongest Illyrian peoples, alongside the Ardiaei and the Autariatae. Whether they were Illyrians in the narrow sense or a people of their own with Thracian influences is still debated in research. The same applies to the question of how directly today's Albanians descend from them: Albanian historians often see the Dardanians as ancestors, while many international researchers consider the evidence too thin for a firm answer.

A kingdom between Macedonia and Illyria

As a political power, Dardania appears in the sources in the fourth century BC. It is often linked to King Bardylis, who in 359 BC defeated the Macedonian king Perdiccas III in a battle in which the king himself fell. Whether Bardylis ruled the Dardanians or another Illyrian realm is disputed among historians. What is certain is that for the next two centuries the Dardanians were among the most dangerous neighbours of Macedonia.

Kings such as Longarus and Bato appear in the sources, and in the second century BC King Monunius, under whom the Dardanians held off the Bastarnae, a people invading from the north. The kingdom changed alliances several times: sometimes it fought Macedonia, sometimes it stood alongside Rome.

The Roman province of Dardania

In 28 BC the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus annexed the kingdom during a campaign against the Dacians and Bastarnae. Dardania was absorbed into the province of Moesia. Only at the end of the third century AD did Emperor Diocletian, as part of his reorganisation of the empire, make Dardania a separate province again. Its capital was Naissus, today's Niš.

The province had cities that can still be traced today: Scupi near Skopje, Naissus, and Ulpiana near today's Gračanica in Kosovo, which in the third and fourth centuries became a flourishing town and the seat of a bishop. The road from the Adriatic coast at Lissus to Naissus ran through it.

Two of the best-known Roman emperors came from this region. Constantine the Great, who made Christianity the favoured religion of the empire, was born in Naissus. And according to his biographer Procopius, Emperor Justinian was born in 482 in Tauresium in the province of Dardania. Near his birthplace he later had a city built in his own honour: Justiniana Prima.

What the name means: the pear

In 1854 the Austrian linguist Johann Georg von Hahn suggested that the name Dardani comes from the same root as the Albanian word dardhë, pear or pear tree. The idea has held up. Place names after fruit trees and animals are common in the region, and there is a striking clue: a tribe attested in Roman times near the Dardanians, the Pirustae, carries a name that may be a Latin translation, from pirus, pear.

Dardania would then simply be the land of pears. That sounds unspectacular, but it fits a world in which people named their places after what grew there. The connection is not proven beyond doubt, but it is the explanation most linguists consider likely.

The Dardanians of Homer's Iliad, the allies of Troy named after the mythical Dardanus, share the name but live on the other side of the Aegean. Whether there was ever a connection between the two is unclear; most researchers treat them as separate.

Dardania today

After the end of antiquity the name disappeared from maps for centuries. It returned in the twentieth century, above all among Albanians in Kosovo, as a reference to a history older than any modern border. Dardan became a popular boy's name, Dardana a girl's name, and clubs, schools and companies took the name.

On 29 October 2000, Ibrahim Rugova, then president of the self-declared Republic of Kosova, introduced the flag of Dardania as a presidential flag: blue, with a red disc ringed in gold and the black eagle, holding a ribbon with the word Dardania. It never became widely popular, but it covered Rugova's coffin in 2006, and the presidency of Kosovo has used it prominently again in recent years.

Why our first collection is called Dardania

A name that has survived more than two thousand years, a kingdom, an empire and long silence, does not need to be loud. That is the idea behind our first collection. On the back of the Dardania leather jacket the double-headed eagle is pressed into the leather, and below it the line DARDANIA COLLECTION.

Anyone who knows the story reads more in it than a place name. Anyone who does not simply sees a good jacket. Both are fine with us.

DROP 01 · DARDANIA LEATHER

The eagle, pressed into leather

The Dardania leather jacket carries the double-headed eagle across the back: 300 millimetres wide, pressed into scale-grain leather. No print, no patch. Numbered, in black and bone white.

SEE THE JACKET →

1. Wikipedia: Dardani
2. Wikipedia: Kingdom of Dardania
3. Wikipedia: Dardania (Roman province)
4. Wikipedia: Ulpiana
5. Wikipedia: Tauresium
6. Flags of the World: Presidential flag of Kosovo (Dardania)