CASTELLAN SURNAME ORIGIN

On our 2006 trip to Croatia, I finally got to visit the island of Rab taking the first shuttle ferry of the morning from the Dalmatian coast. It’s a short 20 minute hop that runs regularly throughout the year. As the woman at the small tourist information agency in Barbat later said, "It looks like you're going to the moon." The Burran winter wind comes down the narrow strait between the mainland and Rab. Virtually nothing grows on that mainland side of the island and it looks like one big rock.

But the Adriatic side is fairly lush and green. Indeed, through history Rab probably has been the most important of the Dalmatian islands relative to human habitation. It was known for its fresh-water springs (over 300) and is probably the only island that had a water-powered mill. Paleolithic era artifacts indicate man has been on Rab since the earliest times. Neolithic and Copper, Bronze and Iron Age settlements followed.

This is a very brief summary from the book "RAB" printed in 1979, 1987, and 1992 by Graficki zavod Hrvatske, Zagreb, which has a nice summary history of Rab translated into several major languages and includes some new and old Rab photos. I also include a little information from "Island of Rab", Library: Tourist Monograph, No. 2., Štamparski zavod “Ognjen Prica”, Zagreb (about 1983).

Rab was first found in history mentioned by the Greeks around 400 BCE. The Roman Plinius the Elder also mentioned Arba in his book Historia Naturalus. Arb or variants was how the island was known by the classical scholars. This morphed linguistically to Rab when the Croats arrived in the seventh century. But the first historical document found with “Rab” mentioned dates to the 15th century and was associated with the founding of the Monastery of St. Euphemia on Rab.

The Liburnian tribe of Illyria contested the infiltration of the first Greeks and finally lost in a major sea battle between Rab and Krk around 398 BCE. At that time the Greeks established fortifications around the Adriatic islands including two on Rab, one at Lopar (northeast Rab, closest to the mainland and earliest part of the island settled by man) and one on the small Kaštelina peninsula protruding north into the large bay. When the Greeks were once again about to lose the Adriatic to the Liburnians and their Adriaei allies, the Greeks allied with Rome. The later soon took control of the area and around 228 BCE with all (Greeks, Liburnians, and Adriaei) acknowledging their supremacy. It took two more centuries until just before the time of Christ to subdue the mainland Illyrian tribes. In 10 A. D. Octavian Augustus granted the town Rab (on Rab Island) the status of municipium which allowed it some autonomous governing control over the greater northern Adriatic islands. Rab flourished economically following this. In 313 Rab got a Bishopric indicating it had become Christian long before. There's a stone sarcophagus sitting outside St. Stepan's Church in Barbat near the cemetery from this earliest period of Christianity.

When the Western Roman Empire fell in the late 400s, Rab for a short while came under the east gothic king Theodoric followed for a short period under the Byzantine Empire in the mid 500s. The Slavs started pressing down the Balkans and the Romans fled to the islands which fell around 600 A. D. They spared the town of Rab with the few remaining Roman refugees but grazed and farmed the rest of the island of Rab. They pretty much kept to themselves. The Byzantines took back this area including Rab in the mid 700s and kept the islands but lost the mainland to the Holy Roman Empire in 803. By the end of this century, the Croats were Christian, their Prince Branimir was now ruling Croatia independently and the Glagolytic script, the first Croatian alphabetic language, was adopted. Most attribute this script to pupils of St. Cyril and Methodius who developed the Cyrillic script for the other Slavic languages around this time. In 925 Rab became part of this Croatian kingdom.

Around this time Venice was on the rise and about 1000 A. D. they took Rab and then were repulsed a few times. Around 1075 Rab was threatened by the Normans who had occupied Italy. In the early 1100s, Venice took control of Rab and most of the other Dalmatian islands. They appointed a Doge, making Rab a part of the Venetian Republic. Only for a few years in this century and again in the early 1300s did Rab revert back to the Croatian kingdom. With the death of a strong Croatian king in 1409, Rab went back under Venetian rule with Venice appointing the top ruler. Rab continued to generally prosper from the East/West trade which Venice engaged in but there were difficult times, too. For example, the plague epidemics of 1449 and 1456 killed a large number of inhabitants. But Venice controlled Rab until 1797 when Napoleon abolished the Venetian Republic and gave Dalmatia to Austria. That is until he took it back in 1805. For a very few years Napoleon was incorporating Dalmatia into the French Empire and implementing his famous French administrative structure. However, before it could really take hold, he lost everything in 1812 when his army was totally defeated in Russia by the cold Russian climate and was forced to retreat. At that time Dalmatia went back to Austrian control until 1918. At the close of the Great World War, the Allied Powers created several non-nations in the Balkans (Yugoslavia) and the Middle East (Iraq, Israel/Palestine) and Africa which for the last 100 years have seen so much human turmoil because of the manner in which they were artificially created.

Where does all this leave the efforts to find the ancestral home of the Castellans? Having visited Rab, I can now make a reasonable speculation. First, I want to insert the one bit of very interesting Castellan family history information I found on Mali Lošinj. I was looking at the 1999/2000 Rijeka phone book which covers the whole northwestern area of Croatia anchored by Rijeka but including Mali Lošinj, Rab the other northern Dalmatian islands.

Surname    Count    Location

Castellan       1       Cres

Kaštelan     81      (49 Barbat, Rab; 5 Mali Lošinj, others spread widely over other towns of Rab, other islands, and Rijecka mainland area) {Note: Kaštelan is the Croatia spelling, Castellan is the Italian. Croatian gradually replaced Italian in the Dalmatian islands beginning about 1870 for speaking and record keeping.) So the fraction 49/81 of those listed are currently living in Barbat.

How big is Barbat? It is one of the smaller communities on Rab located on the southwest coast facing west toward the uninhabited nearby island of Dolan. It has no commercial core and isn't even a small village − it's really just an area with houses and an apartments. There are about 600 numbered buildings in Barbat with some buildings having multiple apartments. (Note: There is one road up the spine of Rab with several small, very short roads splitting off to either side. They don't have names and are really more like driveways for the most part. All buildings have a single number and I'm sure everyone knows where each number can generally be found. Someone's address is 129 Barbat or 458 Barbat and that's it.) All the other towns on Rab have some small commercial core and are generally much bigger in population.

Barbat in the early period before the 1900s was a small subsistence farming and fishing community. It is now mostly residence housing with many units used during the summer tourist season. Tourism is the only real economy on Rab now besides a little subsistence farming still going on. Along the Barbat shore are a few isolated cafes, restaurants, small hotels, some boat slips and very small marinas. Up the hill are small farm patches, most abandoned or with only a few chickens, olive trees, and/or small garden. Barbat has St. Stepan's, a small village church near the shore. The cemetery near the church is now filled mostly with family tombs. The very small old part has a few graves a little earlier than those on Mali Lošinj but I noted none buried who had been born earlier than very late 1800's and dying in the early 1900's. However, my casual inspection clearly indicated the single surname with the greatest number of graves/family vaults was by far Kaštelan and the second place wasn't even close, clearly reinforcing the phone book data that Barbat was clearly the home for the Rab Castellan name. (In contrast, I also walked through the St. Euphemia cemetery in the northern section of Rab. I found not a single Kaštelan grave/vault.)

Did the first castellan get pushed off the mainland when the heathens pushed the Romans out of mainland Illyria (which probably had some forts) in the 500-700 era? No, since surnames weren’t adopted until 900-1200 A. D. with rulers adopting earlier than peasants.I noticed the detailed map of Rab had two very interesting places: Kaštelina, a small peninsula thrusting out into the large northern bay in the north and Kaštel, a small point of land in Barbat. On the detailed Barbat map, all other local spots are generally named after a family that probably once lived there and farmed long ago. But Kaštel is the Croatian for castle/fort, not the family occupational surname Kaštelan who was the keeper of the castle/fort.

Long ago from the Iron Age on there have been humans on Rab. Seven sites are on the mainland (eastern) side and three on the Adriatic (western) side − with three areas of fortification at Kaštelina, the town of Rab and Barbat. The brief history mentions the fortification of Kaštelina by the Greeks in the 400-300 BCE when in conflict with the Liburnians. The woman at the small Barbat tourist agency (who showed me the book Rab when I started asking detailed questions and she kindly let me borrow to copy in the town of Rab − another little adventure in itself!) was born in Barbat. When I asked about the Kaštel point of land in Barbat, she said long ago just inland there was a stone circular fort (a small "keep" would be a good description for those that know Irish castles, not any magnificent fortified home). Although about 100 years ago (and possibly today but I couldn't locate it in my short time on Kaštelina in the brushy wooded sheep pasture) one could see the small pile of stones of the remains of the fortification started around 400-300 BCE, the stones of the Barbat kaštel were reused long, long ago to build local houses when a small stone "keep" was no longer needed for protection.

Around 900-1100 surnames started to be used, being adopted by the peasants much later than the nobility. I don't know if the Iron Age settlement at Barbat included any walled in area for basic protection but it probably did. Over the years it probably was enhanced and, in cycles, fell apart for lack of need and maintenance or being destroyed by invaders. Probably in the early 1100's when Venice finally took general control, the need for such protective structures was paramount and they probably adopted, enhanced or rebuilt them on Rab. Under the authority of the Rab Doge, who lived in a palace in the walled town of Rab, the castellans were probably appointed from the locals living in the farm community surrounding the two stone circle fort structures including the kaštel in Barbat. Those protective forts were probably needed from those early years up to 1500s when the Adriatic pirates and other rouges ceased threatening the relatively prosperous Rab inhabitants. By the 1600s (when the earliest church records are available in Glagolytic script) the "castles" and the castellans to keep them were probably no longer needed. (I still need to tackle the old records to see if I can find any earlier Castellan family ancestors than the Giovanni Castellan born before 1750 in the Italian church records.)

Almost certainly the Castellans continued their subsistence farming which they had been doing all through history. That is unless one of them decided to leave the boring island for a life at sea as a mariner or in foreign lands. From the casual phone book and cemetery inspection data, it appears a good percentage of Castellans stayed in the small community of Barbat where their ancestors had lived, farmed and died for generations probably due more to inertia than anything else.

That's my reasoned speculation on the original source of our Castellan family surname. The research one could do that might further one's knowledge and enhance, modify or change this line of speculation:

1) Find documentation of the archeological research done on the Barbat/Kaštel point area;

2) Research the Venetian era records for Rab concerning establishing and maintaining protective stone forts and/or appointing castellans.