Viminacium

As an American, I still find it very novel to visit historical sites that are over 250 years old. The fact that there are Roman ruins in Serbia seems pretty cool to me. Last weekend we went to Viminacium which, it turns out, was a pretty significant Roman city. The site is only a little over an hour outside of Belgrade. This is the first time I left town to the east and it was amazing how quickly we left any sort of suburbs and entered into farmland. 

The trip to Viminacium provides a nice overview of Serbian life, you see Belgrade, then some enormous suburban housing areas, pass through some mountainous hillsides, then quickly get into fields and farms. Finally, you hit small, rural towns where the residents use their tractors for daily transportation. Avoiding the horse drawn carts and strawberry sellers, you continue down the crumbling streets through the tiny town. Depending on the route you take you can drive between the power company's near-bursting steam pipes and the trash dump or you can drive through the abandoned part of town now taken over by gypsy squatters. Then you drive right up to the entrance of the power company and pass it on by. It definitely feels like you're doing something wrong. In the end, your destination is out in the middle of a farmer's field.

Viminacium itself is an amazingly preserved and, to my untrained eye, a very well maintained and excavated site. We were taken on a private tour (being the only English speakers around) by an archeologist who explained the work that is going on. Most impressive to me is the way the archeologists have left things in place for visitors to see - like skeletons lying in open tombs. 

One of the best features of the site are the frescos inside some of the tombs. Rather than removing the frescoed walls of the tombs to museums, they have built tunnels up into the tombs and put dim lights inside. You can walk up under the tiny coffins and see the inside as the original inhabitant would have. Creepy? Yes, but the context was very cool.

Three major areas have currently been uncovered but there are hundreds of acres (at least) of city beneath the fields still to be excavated. The work could continue for decades more. A nearby power plant is interested in the coal below ground but there seems to be some sort of arrangement worked out due to the prior knowledge the plant had about the site's historical value. Somehow, the plant seems to be obligated to continue buying land from the local farmers as more sites are found to excavate and avoid strip mining the area. An oddly civil arrangement. 

Combining the easy, educational drive with the knowledge dropped by the tour guide, I place Viminacium high on the list of places to take visitors when they visit Belgrade.