A Roman temple at Romanat, Durrës?

During a recent visit to the Archaeological Museum in Durrës, I took a closer look at some of the sculptural fragments that are in the garden. Among sarcophagi, columns, and funerary altars in the garden at the front of the museum are two large architectural fragments with very fine carving.
Photo: C Perry

Photo: C Perry 

The impressive blocks are of the Corinthian order, with a combination of motifs including dentils, flowers and foliate motifs. Given their size and the nature of the decoration, they clearly come from a monumental public building dating to the Roman era and I was intrigued enough to want to find out a bit more about them (they are not labelled).

After a bit of digging online (pardon the pun), I came across the preliminary report of The Dyrrachium Hinterland Project, a collaboration between the University of Helsinki and the Institute of Archaeology of the Centre of Albanological Studies in Albania, which has been studying the landscape along two routes heading south east from Durrës, one of which is the road from Arapaj towards the Erzen river and the village of Romanat. In ancient times this was the route of the Hadrianic-era aqueduct which carried water from the river Erzen to the city of Dyracchium.

While carrying out their survey, the team also documented five architectural blocks found in the garden of Mema Restaurant in Romanat and one in the backyard of a house in Shijak that they speculated might have come from a temple dating to the early 2nd century CE. Local people told the team that the blocks in Romanat and Shijak were found fairly recently near to the Erzen river, therefore not far from the source of the aqueduct built during the reign of Hadrian.

The team noted similarities in dimension and style with the blocks in the garden of the Archaeological Museum and concluded that they came from the same monumental building, despite some minor differences in decoration between the two pieces. These two blocks were in the collections of the museum already in the 1990s and were from Romanat, according to the oral testimony of the museum guards, but unfortunately the records of the museum stores from that period no longer exist.
 
Photo:  Dyrrachium Hinterland Project, Korhonen, Kalle, & Rudenc Ruka
The photograph from the report (above) shows all eight of the blocks, and the similarities are clear. It is thought that seven of the blocks are from the cornice and one from the architrave of the building. The scale and decoration of the blocks are in keeping with a monumental public building, and the style and date fit neatly with building works believed to have been carried out in Dyrrachium by Trajan and Hadrian. The city’s amphitheatre is thought to have been constructed during the reign of Trajan as part of his investment in the eastern Adriatic and interest in the city as the starting point of the Via Egnatia (he had built, at his own expense, the Via Traiana which linked the Via Appia from Beneventum with Brundisium by a shorter route, and then linked up with the Via Egnatia on the other side of the Adriatic). Hadrian, of course, had the aqueduct built to ensure a water supply for the ever-increasing city.

So it seems that the story of the two blocks in the garden of the archaeological museum is that they probably come from a monumental building – perhaps a temple – built in the 2nd century CE, in an area to the south east of the Roman city of Dyrrachium in the vicinity of the modern village of Romanat, the exact location of which is still unknown. Let’s hope that more fragments from the building are discovered so that its location may one day be found.


Further Reading

Gilkes, O., (2013). Albania An Archaeological Guide. I.B.Tauris

Korhonen, K., &  Ruka, R. (2018). Dyrrachium Hinterland Project. First preliminary report. L’Illyrie Méridionale Et l’Epire Dans l'Antiquité: Actes Du VI Colloque International De Tirana (20-23 Mai 2018)

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