A fragment of the tombstone of a Centurion from the 1st Italian Legion was discovered during rescue excavations in the Western Necropolis of the Roman military camp Nove near Svishtov.
The archaeologists, led by Dr. Marin Marinov (IM – Svishtov) and Dr. Kalin Chakarov (RIM – Veliko Tarnovo), began work after a signal from a local resident that he had come across a tomb while uprooting a tree on his property in the villa area of Svishtov, Archaeologia Bulgarica reported.
In fact, it turned out that these were two cist graves (rectangular burial chambers - cists, formed from limestone slabs), plus three more burial facilities. Four of the five are with burial: two cist, one brick and stone masonry and a simple burial pit. The fifth facility is a stepped pit with cremation.
The most interesting are the cist graves – the partially preserved tombstone of the centurion Gaius Valerius Verekund was reused in one of them (his epitaph is in verse and it is mentioned that he was strongly pressed by fate). When this tomb was built, other monuments with inscriptions in Latin were also reused – for example, the tombstone of the veteran of the 1st Italian Legion Marcus Marius Patroclus from Iconium in Asia Minor, today's city of Konya in Turkey. And one of the roof slabs is a stele containing the entire epitaph of Aelia Basila, the “most pious sister“ (soror pientissima) of the person who erected the monument – her brother Publius Aelius Bassus, a veteran and beneficiary (assistant) of the legate of the First Italian Legion.
The arrangement of cist tomb No. 2 is similar. In it, the eastern wall is from the almost completely preserved tombstone of Gaius Alpinius Secundus, a native of Colonia Agrippina (Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium – present-day Cologne in Germany) son of Gaius, of the XI Claudius Legion. The western roof slab contains part of the epitaph of a veteran who served in the army for 25 years and died at the age of 60.
Three of the tombstones are decorated with wreaths, ivy leaves and branches. The monument, dedicated to Marcus Patroclus, also depicts signums – a type of military insignia.
Since all five graves were looted in Antiquity or in modern times, the finds in and around them are few - a bone needle, a spindle fragment, two bronze fibulae. The skeletal remains were found mixed up, but they are yet to be examined by Nadezhda Atanasova - an anthropologist. Senior Assistant Professor Dr. Nikolay Sharankov (SU “St. Cl. Ohridski“) will continue his work on the texts on the tablets.