Together with the tools and methods of siege warfare, fortifications changed fast throughout the world. And ever faster, too. Built in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, Motovun’s walls changed little since the Fifteenth or Sixteenth Century, though. Why? Because Motovun was sidelined as a fortified outpost soon after they were built. The walls would have been an easy prey for a well-equipped and determined adversary in the subsequent centuries, but such an adversary was not interested in them any longer. But why were the walls nonetheless maintained in their original form? Because they offered sufficient protection to a small garrison stationed within. The garrison itself was all that was needed to keep in check the unfriendly but unarmed countryside. Besides, the walls served well as a symbol of power, distant as it was from Motovun, as well as Istria as a whole. After the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, when little was left to covet in plundered Istria, the symbolic rôle was ever more important. Twice a relic, Motovun’s walls now impress only the tourists, many of them from the erstwhile powers that first put them up and then kept them standing mostly for show.