It is hard to say how far these various reproductions of antique forms may be due to the earlier Roman or more Byzantine empire; how far they may be waifs from the wrecks of Siscia or Sirmium; how far filtered in from that later Constantinople which gave the old Serbs their religion and the model of their empire. We know that the traces of the more purely Roman empire, which embraced the old Dacia, Pannonia, and Illyricum, have not entirely perished, for its language lives still among the Roumans of the Carpathian and Danubian plains, among the Tzintzars of Mount Pindus, and never died out in the coast cities of Dalmatia. The Latin population, though reduced to the condition of shepherds, may yet have prevailed to introduce some of their arts among their Sclavonic conquerors. To this day the Tzintzars of the Macedonian mountains assert their technical superiority to the races round in the practice of the art of wood-carving. Considering the preservation of such Latin words as Testja, or Fistjela, or Korpa, we may perhaps be justified in assuming that many of the homely arts we see before us are rather the direct inheritance from Trajan than from Heraclius. Nor must the influence of the Venetians in Croatia be forgotten; for these kept open, in mediæval and later times, the old trade-route between the Adriatic and the Danube, opened out long before by their prototypes the Aquilejans.[154] To them probably is due the small wooden cask, the Croatian _Baril_, the Italian _Barile_; but one evident trace of Venice is to be found in the glass-works which exist at Samobor in Croatia, and in the heart of the deep oak forests of Slavonia. The name _Flašica_, of the glass bottles, may be formed from the Italian _Fiasco_, _Flascon_, and the forms of the rude beakers and the prettily rippled Croatian flasks are true Venetian—light, roughly blown, and of Roman bottle-green. In Dalmatia the importation of similar rude glass vessels still continues from the small Venetian island of Murano—the seat of the famed glass-works of old. But even these Venetian forms are, less directly, but another inheritance from Rome.