What we actually do for an hour and forty-five minutes (or longer)
We meet in front of the Arena — easiest landmark in town, impossible to miss, so nobody's standing around checking their phone wondering if they're in the right spot. From there we walk through Pula's history roughly in the order it happened: Roman colony first, because that's literally what the Arena, the forum, and half the old town are sitting on top of. Then the Venetians, who ran this place for centuries and left their fingerprints on half the street layout. Then the Austro-Hungarians, who turned a quiet port town into one of the biggest naval bases in Europe — this is the part most visitors know nothing about going in, and usually the part they remember walking out. Then the shipyard years, Uljanik, socialist Yugoslavia, and whatever's left of all that today. Then present-day Pula, which is its own strange mix of everything before it.
It's scheduled for an hour and forty-five minutes. It almost never ends on time. Somebody always has a follow-up question about the shipyard, or wants to know why there's a building that looks like it should be a mosque and isn't, or asks what I'd actually order at the market. That's it, we're off script for another ten or fifteen minutes. I don't fight it. If I wanted a tight, timed, rehearsed script, I'd record an audio guide and go sit on a beach instead.
Why I don't charge upfront
Here's the honest version, not the brochure version: charging a fixed price upfront means I'm selling a product, and a product has to be identical every time to justify the price. Pay-what-you-feel-it-was-worth means I'm not selling a product — I'm doing something, and then you decide what that was worth to you. Those are genuinely different jobs. The second one is more interesting to keep doing for eight years straight, and it's also, oddly, more honest, because the price actually reflects whether I did a good job that specific day, not whether I printed the right ticket.
It also means the group kind of self-selects. People who show up to a free tour tend to actually want to be there, rather than filling fifteen minutes between the ferry and lunch. That changes the energy. Small groups, people asking real questions, people who chose Pula and want to understand it rather than tick a box.
What people actually pay
I'm not going to pretend I run this purely out of love for Roman history. Most people leave somewhere around €15 to €20 per person, or €50 to €70 per group, in cash, at the end. Some leave less. A few leave more. A handful have left nothing, and that's fine too — eight years in, the "fine, that's genuinely fine" part gets easier with practice, not harder. It's not a fixed system, and I'm not going to pretend it averages out to some tidy number every week, because it doesn't. Some weeks are good. Some weeks you're standing in front of the Arena in October rain with four people, and you still run the full tour properly, because that's the job.
Which brings up the other thing: I run it in any weather. Rain, wind, the kind of Bura that makes you walk sideways — the tour happens. I'm not cancelling on someone who showed up. That's probably the least glamorous part of doing this for eight years: showing up is most of the job.
The part that isn't on the tour
After the history, I usually end up talking about where to actually eat — not the place with tour-group photos taped to the window, but where I'd send a friend for a fish dinner, or a decent glass of malvazija, or which beach is quiet on a Tuesday. None of that's scripted either. It's just stuff I know because I live here and I've been doing this long enough to have actual opinions about it.
Why I'm still doing this after 8 years
Honestly, because the format still works for me. I've got a background in media and communication plus a degree in Culture and Tourism, and somewhere along the way I figured out that the part I actually like is the live, unscripted bit — the questions, the tangents, the small group where you can have an actual conversation instead of shouting history at forty people behind a flag. I'm listed on GuruWalk at 4.81 out of 5 from sixteen reviews, which I'm reasonably proud of, but what I notice more is which groups hang around after the tour technically ends, still asking questions. That part hasn't gotten old.
If that sounds like your kind of thing, come find me in front of the Arena. Bring questions. Pay me what you think it was worth.