A defensive wall is a fortification usually used to protect a city, town or other settlement from potential aggressors. The walls can range from simple palisades or earthworks to extensive military fortifications with towers, bastions and gates for access to the city. From ancient to modern times, they were used to enclose settlements. Generally, these are referred to as city walls or town walls, although there were also walls, such as the Great Wall of China, Walls of Benin, Hadrian's Wall, Anastasian Wall, and the Atlantic Wall, which extended far beyond the borders of a city and were used to enclose regions or mark territorial boundaries. In mountainous terrain, defensive walls such as letzis were used in combination with castles to seal valleys from potential attack. Beyond their defensive utility, many walls also had important symbolic functions – representing the status and independence of the communities they embraced.
Ajdovščina is a town in the Vipava Valley, Slovenia. It is the administrative seat of the Municipality of Ajdovščina.
Emona or Aemona was a Roman castrum, located in the area where the navigable Nauportus River came closest to Castle Hill, serving the trade between the city's settlers – colonists from the northern part of Roman Italy – and the rest of the empire. Emona was the region's easternmost city, although it was assumed formerly that it was part of the Pannonia or Illyricum, but archaeological findings from 2008 proved otherwise. From the late 4th to the late 6th century, Emona was the seat of a bishopric that had intensive contacts with the ecclesiastical circle of Milan, reflected in the architecture of the early Christian complex along Erjavec Street in present-day Ljubljana.
Eboracum was a fort and later a city in the Roman province of Britannia. In its prime it was the largest town in northern Britain and a provincial capital. The site remained occupied after the decline of the Western Roman Empire and ultimately developed into the present-day city of York, in North Yorkshire, England.
Novae was initially one of the few great Roman legionary fortresses along the empire's border, forming part of the defences along the Danube in northern Bulgaria. The settlement later expanded into a town in the Roman province of Moesia Inferior, later Moesia Secunda.
Located in Turkey, the settlement of Satala, according to the ancient geographers, was situated in a valley surrounded by mountains, a little north of the Euphrates, where the road from Trapezus to Samosata crossed the boundary of the Roman Empire, when it was a bishopric, which remains a Latin Catholic titular see. Later it was connected with Nicopolis by two highways. Satala is now Sadak, a village of 348 inhabitants (2022), in the Kelkit District of Gümüşhane Province in Turkey.
Porolissum was an ancient Roman city in Dacia. Established as a military fort in 106 during Trajan's Dacian Wars, the city quickly grew through trade with the native Dacians and became the capital of the province Dacia Porolissensis in 124. The site is one of the largest and best-preserved archaeological sites in modern-day Romania. It is 8 km away from the modern city of Zalău, in Moigrad-Porolissum village, Mirsid Commune, Sălaj County.
Dinogetia was an ancient Geto-Dacian settlement and later Roman fort located not far from the right (southern) bank of the Danube near the junction of the Siret River. The Dinogetia site is situated in Northern Dobruja, Romania, 8 km east of Galați and 2 km north of Garvăn, a village in Jijila commune.
The Ram Fortress is a 15th century fort situated on a steep slope on the right bank of the Danube, in the village of Ram, municipality of Veliko Gradište, eastern Serbia. The fortress is located on a rock, which is from the northeast side tilted towards the Danube. It is assumed that the city was built on the opposite side from Haram fortress, which was located across the Danube and left no remnants. The remains of the city are in good condition.
The Vipava Valley is a valley in the Slovenian Littoral, roughly between the village of Podnanos to the east and the border with Italy to the west. The main towns are Ajdovščina and Vipava.
Located in Roman province of Dacia, present-day Romania, the Limes Porolissensis was a frontier of the Roman empire in Dacia Porolissensis, the northernmost of the three Dacian provinces. It was a defensive line dating from the 2nd century AD after the Conquest of Dacia. The frontier was a complex network of over 100 observation towers, fortlets, walls and forts disposed in a line over 200 km from the Apuseni Mountains to the Eastern Carpathians, following the highland chain of the Meseș Mountains.
Povir is a village in the Municipality of Sežana in the Littoral region of Slovenia. It includes the hamlets of Britof, Dulanja Vas, and Guranja Vas.
Col is a settlement on the edge of a karst plateau overlooking the Vipava Valley in the Municipality of Ajdovščina in the traditional Inner Carniola region of Slovenia. It is now generally regarded as part of the Slovenian Littoral. A Roman road led through the settlement. Its location overlooking the valley on the main route leading inland was used in the Middle Ages and later as a checkpoint between the Littoral region and Carniola. Trilek Castle is located on the eastern outskirts of the village.
Lokavec is a settlement on the northern edge of the Vipava Valley northwest of Ajdovščina in the Littoral region of Slovenia. It lies below the slopes of Mount Čaven, below the Slano Blato Landslide. It includes the hamlets of Bitovi, Brith, Čohi, Gorenje, Kuši, Lahovše, Loretovše, Mizinška Vas, Paljki, and Slokarji.
Otlica is a dispersed settlement in the hills north of Ajdovščina in the Littoral region of Slovenia. It is made up of smaller clusters of the hamlets of Sibirija, Kitajska, Kurja Vas, and Cerkovna, as well as a number of outlying isolated farms.
Stomaž is a village in the hills north of the Vipava Valley in the Municipality of Ajdovščina in the Littoral region of Slovenia. It is made up of several smaller hamlets: Brith, Dolenja Vas, Hrib, Ljubljanica, Griže, Črnigoji, Bratini, and Batagelji.
Trilek Castle, also known as Old Castle, is a small castle or fort in the settlement of Col, in the Municipality of Ajdovščina in southwest Slovenia. Built in the early 16th century, it was first mentioned in the 17th-century historian Johann Weikhard von Valvasor's 1689 survey The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola.
Claustra Alpium Iuliarum was a defense system within the Roman Empire between Italia and Pannonia that protected Italy from possible invasions from the East. It secured the Postojna Gate, the land link between the eastern and western part of the empire, and thus the Claustra represented an inner border defense of the empire. Unlike a linear rampart, the Claustra consisted of a series of interconnected fortifications with its center at Castra ad Fluvium Frigidum ; other important fortresses were Ad Pirum on today's Hrušica Plateau and Tarsatica, now a part of the city of Rijeka. They had been governed from the town of Aquileia.
Capidava was originally an important Geto-Dacian centre on the right bank of the Danube. After the Roman conquest, it became a civil and military centre in the province of Moesia Inferior and part of the defensive frontier system of the Moesian Limes along the Danube.
Ayaz-Kala is an archaeological site in Ellikqala District, Karakalpakstan, in northern Uzbekistan, built between the 4th century BCE and the 7th century CE. Situated on a hilltop overlooking the Kyzylkum Desert, the site encompasses the ruins of an ancient Khorezm fortress.
