Sarmizegetusa Regia

← Encyclopedia

The road climbs out of the Mureş valley and up into the Şureanu range, through beech and pine, to a saddle of terraces a little over a thousand meters above the sea. There is no city on the plain below to announce it. The Dacians built their capital where the mountains close in, on a series of artificial platforms cut into the slope at Grădiştea de Munte, and they faced its walls with blocks of dressed limestone laid in the manner that the moderns, borrowing a phrase, call the murus dacicus — the Dacian wall. What survives is a citadel of hewn stone, a network of paved approaches, and, on a great leveled terrace east of the main gate, the foundations of a precinct of sanctuaries: rings and ranks of stone column-bases standing in the grass, the holy ground of a kingdom that the Romans took apart stone by stone.

This is Sarmizegetusa Regia — the royal Sarmizegetusa — and the qualifier matters, because there are two places of nearly the same name. The one in the high mountains was the capital of the free Dacian state. Some forty kilometers to the west, down on the plain near the modern village of Sarmizegetusa, lie the ruins of Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa, the Roman colonial capital that Trajan founded after the conquest, carrying the old name down to the lowland as a trophy. The two are routinely confused. They are not the same place, and they are not the same world: the mountain Sarmizegetusa is Dacian and was destroyed in 106 CE; the plains Sarmizegetusa is Roman and was built in the years that followed. This entry concerns the first.

The mountain capital

The high terraces at Grădiştea de Munte were the heart of a defensive system that the Dacians raised across the Orăştie Mountains in the first century BCE and the first century CE — a cluster of fortresses guarding the approaches to the sacred and royal center. Six of these strongholds, with Sarmizegetusa Regia foremost among them, were inscribed together on the World Heritage list in 1999; the UNESCO World Heritage Centre records them, in the listing of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, as the Dacian Fortresses of the Orăştie Mountains and describes works “built in the 1st centuries B.C. and A.D. under Dacian rule” that show “an unusual fusion of military and religious architectural techniques and concepts from the classical world and the late European Iron Age.” The six — Sarmizegetusa Regia, Costeşti-Cetăţuie, Costeşti-Blidaru, Piatra Roşie, Băniţa, and Căpâlna — formed the nucleus of the kingdom and were taken by Rome at the opening of the second century.

The Dacians of the Carpathian highlands were the northern kin of the Getae of the lower Danube; the Greek and Roman writers used the two names loosely, and the people they describe shared a language, a pantheon, and the cult of Zalmoxis. It was a king of this people, Burebista, who toward the middle of the first century BCE welded the tribes into a single power that reached for a time from the Danube to the steppe. The tradition makes the high mountain center the seat of his rule, and the place reached its height under the last great Dacian king, Decebalus, whose name is bound to its walls and to its fall. Around the citadel, on terraces above and below, stood the dwellings of nobility and priesthood, the workshops of ironsmiths whose tools and weapons have come up in their thousands, the water conduits of fired-clay pipe, and the storehouses of the kingdom. For the better part of two centuries this was the political center of the Dacian state — and, in a way that the lowland fortresses were not, its religious center as well. For the deeper genealogy of the people who built it, see the Dacians and the Getae; for the kingdom and Roman province that bore the name, Dacia.

The wall that defended the citadel deserves a word of its own, because it gave its name to a whole technique. The murus dacicus is a wall built of two parallel faces of carefully dressed limestone blocks, the cavity between them packed with rubble and earth and bound, crucially, by timber beams seated in dovetailed sockets cut into the inner faces of the stone. The result married the look of a Greek ashlar wall to a flexible timber core that could take the shock of a ram or a tremor of the ground without shattering — a fusion, exactly as the World Heritage listing says, of classical and late Iron Age building. The Dacians had learned the dressing of stone from the Hellenistic world to their south, and they put it to a purpose of their own. At Sarmizegetusa Regia the citadel wall enclosed roughly three hectares of ground in a rough hexagon, its facing some three meters thick; the same technique runs through the sister fortresses of the Orăştie range, and it is by this signature wall that the whole defensive system is recognized.

The sacred terrace at Sarmizegetusa Regia, with the column-bases of the sanctuaries standing in ranks. Oroles, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The sacred terrace and the sun of andesite

A paved road climbs from the eastern gate of the citadel to the leveled terrace where the sanctuaries stand, and it is this ground — not the fortress wall — that gives Sarmizegetusa Regia its distinct place among the holy sites of the Thracian and Dacian world. Where Perperikon is a hall cut into living rock and Starosel a temple buried in a mound, the precinct here is open and architectural: rows of foundations, set out with a surveyor’s regularity, that once carried columns of stone and timber.

Several kinds of sanctuary stand on the terrace. The rectangular ones survive as ordered arrays of column-bases — disks of andesite and of limestone laid in lines, the footings of a forest of posts that have long since burned or rotted away. One source from the lowland tradition, the sixth-century writer Jordanes, took the standing pillars of such Dacian sanctuaries for an image of the sacred pine grove; the reading is late and secondhand, and the modern excavators are careful with it, but the pillared form is plain enough in the stone. The World History Encyclopedia, describing the great limestone sanctuary, notes that its rows of pillars of stone or wood were raised on stone bases that survive to the present day — the bare bones of a building whose upper structure is entirely gone.

Two circular sanctuaries also stand on the terrace, and the larger of them is the most discussed structure on the site. Its plan is concentric: an outer ring of low andesite blocks; within that a ring of taller andesite pillars set in alternating groups; within that again a setting of timber posts arranged, the excavators found, in the shape of a D, ringed by a wooden circle. At the center stood a small apsidal chamber. Because the numbers of pillars and posts fall into regular groupings, and because the central chamber appears to be aligned, the great circular sanctuary has been read as a calendar in stone and wood — a device for keeping the year and marking the solstices. It is a striking idea, and it is worth being exact about its standing: the calendrical reading is an interpretation, advanced and refined by archaeologists working from the surviving settings, not a fact recovered from any Dacian text. The Dacians left no writing to confirm what the rings counted. The same caution belongs to the carved object that visitors know as the andesite sun — a disc of andesite, set into the pavement at the head of the terrace, divided by carved lines into ten radiating segments, like the spokes or rays of a wheel. It has been read as a solar altar, as a sundial, as the focal point of the sacred reckoning. Each reading is plausible; none is certain. What can be said plainly is that the disc exists, carved and in place, that it is shaped like a rayed sun, and that whatever its precise use, it sat at the ritual heart of the terrace.

The large circular sanctuary, with an andesite bowl and a column fragment among the footings of its rings; the building has been read as a calendar, though the Dacians left no text to confirm it. Codrinb, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0 RO.

Behind the architecture stands a priesthood. For the Dacian religion the indispensable outside witness is the geographer Strabo, writing in the generation after Burebista, and what he reports is at the usual distance — a Greek account of a people he did not visit, drawing on earlier sources. He describes a tradition in which a man named Zalmoxis, having traveled and learned, returned to the Getae, withdrew to a cavern, and was taken by the people as more than a man, becoming a god to them; and he tells of a later figure, Decaeneus, who served Burebista as counselor and was held in like reverence, the people obeying him as they would a god. Strabo ties this priestly office to a sacred mountain — he names it Cogaeonus — and to a river of the same name that flowed past it. Whether the Cogaeonus of Strabo is the heights of Sarmizegetusa Regia is a question modern scholars have asked and cannot settle; the identification is attractive and unproven. What the tradition makes clear, and what the terrace seems to confirm in stone, is that the Dacian kingdom kept a caste of priests close to its kings, charged with the cult and, very probably, with the calendar — the reckoning of the festivals and the year. The god of the bright sky to whom this people looked, and the immortality the Getae claimed, belong to that priestly world; on the sky-god Gebeleizis and the cult of Zalmoxis the sources speak at their own length and their own distance.

It is worth holding the three kinds of knowledge apart, because the terrace tempts a reader to run them together. The architecture is the firmest ground: the column-bases, the rings of andesite, the rayed disc, the burned floor of the great sanctuary are physical facts, dug from the mountain and measured. The history of the place — Burebista’s kingdom, Decebalus’s last stand, Trajan’s two wars — comes from the Greek and Roman writers and from the Roman monuments, external and interested but datable and largely consistent. The religion that the terrace served is the most distant of the three: it reaches the modern reader almost entirely through Greek eyes, through Herodotus on the Getae and Strabo on the priesthood, and through a single late Gothic compiler, never through a Dacian voice. What the rings counted, what the priests said over the andesite disc, what the immortality of the Getae meant to those who held it — these the stones do not record. The honest account marks the seam between the andesite, which can be measured, and the meaning, which must be reconstructed.

The siege, the fall, and the long recovery

The mountain capital met its end in the Dacian Wars of the emperor Trajan. The first war, in 101 and 102 CE, drove Decebalus to terms and saw the outer fortifications of the kingdom partly dismantled. The peace did not hold. In the second war Trajan came again, and in 106 CE his army closed on Sarmizegetusa Regia itself. Britannica records that the Romans cut the city’s water supply, that the capital fell, and that the defeated Decebalus — rather than be taken — killed himself; within a year Dacia was a Roman province. The fall is among the best-documented events of the ancient Danube frontier, narrated by the historian Cassius Dio and carved, scene by scene, on the spiral frieze of Trajan’s Column in Rome, where the death of the Dacian king is shown to all who pass beneath it.

What the Romans did to the sanctuaries was deliberate. The great circular sanctuary was burned in the taking of the city; the precinct was thrown down, the cult ended, the priesthood scattered. The Roman victors had no use for the high mountain seat — their Sarmizegetusa would rise on the plain — and the terraces at Grădiştea de Munte fell silent within a generation, the platforms of a kingdom that no longer existed.

They were not entirely forgotten. The dressed stone of the walls drew looters across the centuries, and the mountains gave up, again and again, hoards of Dacian gold and silver coin — the spoils of the conquest, or the buried wealth of the kingdom — so that the name Sarmizegetusa carried a charge of treasure long before it carried a charge of scholarship. Systematic excavation came in the twentieth century, opening the terraces, mapping the sanctuaries, recording the conduits and the smithies, and beginning the long argument over what the rings of stone had measured. That argument has not closed. The calendar in the great circle, the use of the andesite sun, the alignment of the apsidal chamber — these remain matters of careful inference, and the most honest account of them keeps the inference visible as inference. What stands beyond dispute is the shape of the place: a fortress of murus dacicus, a sacred terrace of pillared sanctuaries, a rayed disc of stone at its head, all set high in the Şureanu Mountains and all of a piece with a religion the Greek and Roman writers glimpsed from outside.

The mountain has also drawn, in the modern period, a current of national feeling — a sense of Sarmizegetusa as the lost spiritual capital of an ancestral Romanian past, and, at its edges, claims of an unbroken Dacian inheritance that historians treat with reserve. That afterlife belongs to the present, not the terraces: it is a modern reception of the place, not a fact recovered from the stone. The mountain capital does not need it. The dressed walls and the rings of andesite carry their own weight.

In 1999 the site took its place, with the five other fortresses of the Orăştie Mountains, on the World Heritage list — recognized not as a single monument but as the surviving nucleus of a kingdom, the strongholds that, in the words of the inscription, “give a dramatic picture of a vigorous and innovative civilization.” Among the holy places of the Thracian and Dacian peoples — the rock acropolis of Perperikon, the cult-tomb of Starosel, the megalithic sanctuary of Tatul — Sarmizegetusa Regia stands as the one that was also a capital: the mountain where the priesthood kept the year and the king kept the kingdom, until the year that both came down.

→ Related: The Dacians · The Getae · The Odrysians · Zalmoxis · Dacia · Thrace · Perperikon · Starosel · Tatul · Gebeleizis · Bendis · The Thracian Horseman · Kotys Goddess · Derzelas · Dionysus · Apollo