The stop nobody puts on a postcard
People sign up for my tour expecting the Arena, maybe a story about gladiators, something with a bit of weight to it. They don't expect me to stop in front of a hole in a wall and tell them this is where Austro-Hungarian soldiers used to relieve themselves. But I do it anyway, and it's one of the stops people bring up months later, long after they've forgotten which emperor built which fort.
Pula wasn't just a pretty coastal town under the Habsburgs. From the mid-1800s until the end of the First World War it was the main war harbor of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, which meant thousands of sailors and soldiers living here at any given time. An army that size needs infrastructure, and not the romantic kind. It needs barracks, supply lines, hospitals, and yes, toilets. What's left of one of those old military latrine structures still stands, tucked away where most visitors would walk right past it without a second look.
I stop there because it's honest. We like to imagine history as a sequence of battles, treaties, and grand architecture, and Pula gives you plenty of that too, forts on every hill, a navy that once rivaled the big powers. But the daily reality of a garrison town wasn't glamorous. It was thousands of young men stationed far from home, doing drills, waiting for orders, and using some very basic military plumbing. Showing people that structure explains what Austro-Hungarian Pula actually felt like better than another plaque about a general ever could.
The other one
The brothel stop usually gets the bigger reaction, mostly because people assume I'm joking when I bring it up. I'm not. Wherever you had soldiers and sailors stationed in large numbers for long stretches, you had a whole shadow economy built around them: laundries, taverns, and brothels, all a normal, documented part of garrison life at the time. Pula was no exception. The building tied to that history is still standing, and I point it out on the way to somewhere else, almost as a side note.
What interests me isn't the building itself, it's what it tells you about who actually lived in this city. Guidebooks focus on admirals and architects, and fair enough, they earned their monuments. But most people walking these same streets over a century ago weren't admirals. They were conscripts and sailors, often young, far from their families, with plenty of downtime between duties. The brothel wasn't scandalous in that world, it was infrastructure, same as the latrine, just serving a different need. Both tell you more about ordinary garrison life than the Arena ever will.
Why I keep both stops in
Some guides would cut these out, worried they undercut the seriousness of the tour. I think the opposite. A tour that only hits the impressive stuff gives you a flattened version of history, all generals and no soldiers, all palaces and no barracks. The toilet and the brothel are small, almost throwaway details, but they're the kind that make a couple of centuries of military history feel like it happened to actual people instead of to a textbook.
They also happen to be funny, and I'm not going to pretend that doesn't matter. I've done this for eight years now, and I've learned that a group that's laughing is a group that's paying attention. If I can get a laugh out of a crumbling latrine wall, I've got your attention for the next ten minutes, which is usually when I slip in something you'll actually remember, like why this harbor mattered so much to an empire that didn't even have much of a coastline to speak of.
So yes, somewhere in the middle of a walking tour about forts, emperors, and a two-thousand-year-old amphitheater, I'm going to stop and tell you about a toilet, and a few minutes later, a brothel. People usually laugh at both. Then they ask better questions for the rest of the walk, and honestly, that's the whole point of the detour.