Marisia - Maros Megyei Múzeum Évkönyve 1. (2019)
Aurora Peţan: News ont he Discovery of the Ruins from Grădiştea Muncelului int he International and Local Press from the Beginning of the 19th Century
News on the Discovery of the Ruins from Grädiqea Muncelului... 53 it is shown that the ruins are overgrown by an old forest. This is the first published description of the ruins. Eder had access to many of the Transylvanian archives. He is the one who saved several documents, by copying them, among which a few reports of the Austrian Tax Authority.20 His information is probably sourced from these reports. His text appeared after the first digging reports had been drawn up and, for this reason, he brought extra information, as compared to the Treasuriate press release. Most remarkably, Eder intuited the Dacian origin of these vestiges and assigned them to Decebalus who, in his opinion, would have built them for defense, after the first war with Trajan. He quotes historian Konrad Mannert, who claimed that these mountains were Decebalus’ refuge place, after he had been chased out of his own residence. Just as Hene, Eder pointed out to the fact that the officials mobilized in order to investigate the area. The text with the greatest impact all along the 19th century was that of Major Péchy Mihály, published on the 1st of July 1805 in a Transylvanian newspaper under the heading Bemerkungen über die unlängst Vorgefundenen alten römischen Ruinen bei Gredistie.21 Dispatched to Grädi$tea Muncelului short after the diggings made by the Tax Authority had ended, the major drew up a report on the 26th of June 1805, preserved to this day in the Imperial War Archives of Vienna and immediately published by the Transylvanian magazine. The text is short and it has two parts: the description of the most important monuments seen on the site (four in number) and an attempt at establishing the identity of the antique city. In his capacity of architect with a classic instruction, Péchy was influenced by what he knew from Greek and Roman architecture, so that he sought for similarities in the vestiges from Gradate. Thus, the great stone circle was, in his opinion, a monopteros-type temple, by analogy with the one in Pozzuoli (which proved later to be a macellum). The large building south of the fortification was that of a Roman bath, according to him. He also noticed the city walls, built of limestone and a clay pipeline placed on carved stone blocks. His conviction was that the ruins of Gradi§tea Muncelului are those of a Roman city, identified as Aquae. The echoes of this text are to be found a few years later in the press: for instance, in 1807, Allgemeine Literaturzeitung published a press review for the year 1805 and included an abstract of Péchy’s article.22 As the chamber authorities never published the results of the excavations from 1803-1804, and Péchy s report was the only text published at that time on the excavations, the public opinion attached the major’s name to these excavations. To this, surely contributed the fact that the image of the officer was attached to the garrison that had really taken part in the excavations and which the public opinion was knowledgeable of. The error persisted until the publication of the Austrian Tax Authority reports by Sigismund Jakó. He showed that Péchy was mistakenly attributed the management of the excavations, since he never took part in them, but he only visited the site one year after they had been closed.23 The public opinion must have waited with interest for the publication of the excavations’ results. Unfortunately, they were not made public until a few decades ago. More than a century after Xaver Hene’s article, announcing the beginning of the diggings and promising that the results would be published, Finály Gábor pointed out that nothing had been published related to the official endeavors deployed at these ruins and he, somehow ironically, expressed his hope that they would not have to wait for another hundred years to hear some news related to this topic.24 Unfortunately, his fears turned true.25 20 Pejan 2018, 133. 21 Péchy 1805. For a detailed analysis of this report see Pejan 2018, 129-131 and 241-243. 22 Allgemeine Literaturzeitung vom Jahre 1807, Erste Band, Januar bis Junius, no 98,24 April 1807, Coll. 780, Halle-Leipzig. 23 Jakó 1973,636. 24 Finály 1911,349; Finály 1916, 12. 25 The excavation reports were identified in archives and edited by S. Jakó in 1966-1973, but they were turned into account only in 2018, see Pejan 2018, 82.
