The territory of the Roman Empire was vast, from Scandinavia to India. In an attempt to present the complexity of ancient Rome, and yet give our festival a geographical designation, the name and logo are carefully chosen as the seal of time and place, so that we never forget our invisible roots.
The name
Translated into Latin, SCUPINI ROMANI means “Skopje Romans” or “The citizens of the Roman city of Scupi”. If you read carefully the scientific texts dedicated to the archaeological site Scupi, you will discover the irresistibly mysterious secret stories about a respected notary, about an unknown cafe dancer, about a Jew strangely buried in a lead sarcophagus, about an educated surgeon.
Archaeologist Ms. Lence Jovanova, who is the head of the excavation at the archaeological site Scupi together with Ms. Marina Onchevska-Todorovska, in one of her scientific articles she writes: ‘To understand the content and essence of the story, to reconstruct the real life of the past, it is necessary to use a great imagination that will revive them; their creativity, emotions, thoughts, senses, dreams, aspirations of the former inhabitants of Scupi – our ancestors, whose destinies are inextricably embedded not only in the archaeological remains, but in ourselves and our collective memory ‘.
The logo
The logo is actually a drawing of a type of luxury Roman pottery that in the science was introduced by J.W. Hayes (1963). He named this kind of pots as the “Macedonian” gray terra sigillata. In addition to the widespread and recognizable Roman red pottery, archaeological sites from the late antique period contain another type of luxury pottery. It is a late antique type of pottery that has been found at many archaeological sites from the Roman period in the Balkans, but it is mainly spread in Macedonia and from there it gets its scientific epithet. Our logo is a visualization of a beautiful small luxury Roman ceramic plate found at the archaeological site Scupi in Skopje. We thank to the graphic designer Paul Adams for the creative design of our logo.
