Felix Romuliana, the fortified palace, is a pleasant surprise. It is situated in the countryside of eastern Serbia. I arrived around midday, just when the sun broke through again. Two things stood out immediately: the almost perfect walls around the palace complex and the ticket booth at the entrance. This was my first taste of “Serbian tourism”: a bus full of schoolchildren was already there, and later another group arrived (I sneaked up on them and believe they were Belgian tourists). And I paid my first entrance fee here in Serbia. It costs 200 dinar, just under 2 EUR.

The palace walls were made out of opus mixtum, a mix of brick and stone. This results in fine decoration all along the fortifications. It looks so good (also from a distance when you’re driving up the road), I initially thought it was a reconstruction that had gone a bit over-the-top. But the walls are all original.

The site within the walls is mostly overgrown with grass. I read in the AB evaluation that they plan to leave it this way, as more archeological digging would lead to more harm. You can walk around freely, except for the mosaics on the ground there are no forbidden areas or warnings not to touch anything.

Also special is the visual link that has been made between the palace and the two tumuli on a nearby hill. This is where Galerius and his mother were buried. For Emperor Galerius, it was the spot of his apotheosis: the ceremony where he turned from a man into a god. The best place to ponder this kind of sacred connotation is from the terrace of the little on-site café, which has great views of the palace with the tumuli in the background. It’s an atmospheric place in general, and there are many stories to be told.

After I left Gamzigrad, I drove on to the nearest large city: Zajecar. I stayed overnight and visited the local museum. This is a good addition to a field visit, as the most important findings are kept and displayed here. It was a surreal museum visit though – the staff all seemed very busy at their offices, and a ticket for sale had to be retrieved from a drawer. Then I was left on my own, wandering the 8 exhibition halls or so. All the lights were turned off, so I switched them on one by one myself. And yes – I switched most of them off too after I had finished a room. The displays in the hall on the ground floor were the best, among them the greatest mosaics that were discovered at Gamzigrad. On the first floor, there’s a large model of how the fortified palace would have looked in its heyday. Very impressive.