Cetatea Capidava

History

Emperor Trajan's forces built Capidava in the early 2nd century AD to guard a fordable stretch of the Danube and anchor Rome's limes defensive line, garrisoning it initially with a Germanic auxiliary cohort inside walls enclosing a compact, cliff-top square roughly 100 by 125 meters. Goths destroyed it in the 3rd century, but it was rebuilt in the 4th and grew into a Christian bishopric, before further cycles of destruction and reconstruction carried it into the Byzantine period, when it was fortified again under Justinian. It was finally abandoned in 559 after a Cutrigur invasion, briefly resettled, then burned for good by Pecheneg raiders in 1036. Archaeological digs running from the 1920s through the 1960s uncovered its walls, gates, towers, and foundations largely intact, and the site remains an active excavation today, with its Roman-era ramparts and later Byzantine additions both visible layered on top of each other above the river.