FUIT
Was
Nyírő András
In Hungary, 40 km north of Budapest, there is a small mountain village, Kesztölc. A marble column on a side road preserves the Roman Empire’s glory and Pannonia Provincia’s glory. It was not placed by archaeologists, but by road builders. This inscription was carved into the column:
THIS STONE WAS ERECTED BY THE HUNGARIAN ROAD ADMINISTRATION,
TO COMMEMORATE THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE NATIONAL ROAD NO. 10,
NEXT TO THE REMAINS OF THE ROMAN ROAD CONNECTING AQUINCUM TO BRIGETIO
MCMXCV
The column stands in quiet solitude. No festive commemorations are held here. Today, the detour next to the national road is a sad battleground of the war between illegal dumpsters and the village caretaker. After dark, plastic garbage bags are placed here. The liberation operation comes every few months. The village caretaker cleans up the rubbish heap with enthusiastic young people. They are persistent and determined, like the Roman legionnaires. They deserve a triumphal arch or a column next to the village.
Pannonia provincia was formed in the decades after our era. It was the best period of the Roman Empire. After the death of Julius Caesar, Augustus became emperor. He established a period of peace lasting almost two hundred years. In the northeastern tip of the vast empire, Pannonia developed nicely. It was populated by soldiers, merchants, and craftsmen. They built roads and developed their most important camps into cities. The road commemorated by today’s road builders connected two military towns: Aquincum and Brigetio.
The peaceful construction was destroyed by barbarian invasions from the end of the 2nd century. Pannonia became an important strategic point of the empire, where the Romans tried to stop the invading tribes. The increased strategic importance of the province is shown by the fact that several emperors came from here. Time was on the side of the barbarians. The Romans were forced to defend themselves. They built high walls and set up their camps on heights. Watchtowers were erected on the border of the province, on the banks of the Danube, from where they spied on the movements of the barbarians. In the end, they had to flee, they gave up the province of Pannonia in the 4th century.
This happened more than fifteen hundred years ago. Since then, the buildings of the Romans have been destroyed by fire, rain, wind, and ice. Bricks and stones were used as building materials by the settling Avars, and later by the Hungarians. The ruins were further destroyed by the Tatars and Turks. In the 18th century, the remains were in the way of the constructions of the lords and high priests, they were blown up, demolished, and built on. The industrial revolution and large-scale agriculture also took their toll. What was left was further flattened by two world wars and forced industrialization.
The Romans built with stone, on rock-solid foundations, they were not attracted by the temporary, the disposable. After so much destruction, there are still road remnants and building ruins. Today, even in the best case, these ruins only reach up to our knees. But they indicate that once upon a time, more than fifteen hundred years ago, people lived here who believed in permanence and eternity.
In one way or another, the heirs of the Roman Empire incorporated the Roman past into their national self-consciousness. The Italians think they are the heirs of the Romans. Over the ruins of Rome, Pompeii, and other great cities, Italian is spoken today. The French can be proud that the Gauls fought against Julius Caesar. In the stories of Asterix and Obelix, they can say: Ils sont foux ces Romains, these Romans are fools. The Germans draw strength from the fact that they defeated the armies of Augustus, one of the greatest rulers of the ancient world. The second season of the series Barbarians on Netflix tells the details of the battle that took place in the Teutonburg Forest. One of the pillars of Romanian national identity is that the Dacians, the inhabitants of the former Roman province of Dacia, are the ancestors of today’s Romanians.
We Hungarians don’t have such a legend. The first Hungarian tribes arrived in the Carpathian basin more than five hundred years after the Romans. No one thinks that we are descended from the Romans or that we fought against them. We know, we experience, that our Judeo-Christian culture was built on Greco-Roman foundations, we know that Buda, Székesfehérvár, Esztergom, Szombathely, Győr were created on the site of the cities of the Romans. If asked, most of us would probably not be able to answer what it means to us, Hungarians, that the limes that separated the Roman Empire from the barbarians were here.
What does the Roman Empire mean to us Hungarians? The answers are right here in front of us. It is enough to travel from Óbuda to Komárom. The earth preserves traces of cities, fortresses, watchtowers, and milestones. We guard these differently in each settlement. It is in the small villages of the Danube bend, where knee-deep ruins run in, and one can only guess where the watchtower might have been from the archaeologists’ articles. In Aquincum, you can wander the former streets of the burgher city in an exemplary museum environment. The two amphitheaters in Óbuda are in good condition, but as if life had not returned here since the death of the last gladiator, they preserve a foreign, quarantined world in the heart of the city. In Óbuda and Esztergom, modern buildings are organically complemented by Roman monuments, and we can meet them on our way home. My favorite is the guard tower in Leányfalu, it seems to fit in peacefully with the neighboring gas station with busy traffic. An excavation was just being carried out in Dömös, someone recently bought a garden under which there was a Roman watchtower. In Nyergesújfalu, they didn’t even try to dig, and how well they did it, the walls are resting under a thick cover of earth, but their outline is still visible. On Almásfüzítő, the red mud reservoirs loom irrevocably above the ruins of the Azaum camp. But this did not bother the locals, a friendly Roman-style playground and buildings were built a little further away.
Such is our Roman past, diverse, lovable, and unforgettable. No iron-clad ideology has settled on it, every village and town can see what they want in it.
