Stopfenreuth is probably not one of the best-known settlement names along the Danube, even in Austrian terms, and the riverine forest on the outskirts of the village, which barely belongs to Engelhartstetten, might even seem like the end of the world from Vienna, even though in ancient times one of the arteries of European trade, the Amber Road, ran crossed the Danube here. There is no visible evidence of the site's importance in the muddy riverine forest today, but when archaeologists scratch the sediment layers of the Danube, they come across ancient Roman walls.
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| The tower of the military camp, unlike what we are used to, was located inside the wall. |
On 20 February 2025, the website of the Donauauen National Park published an article that archaeologists from the Carnuntum Museum and the Austrian Archaeological Institute had discovered a Roman fortress in the Stopfenreuther Au area of the Austrian national park. To be more precise, only what was left of it by the Danube; a short section of wall in the northern corner of the military camp, together with the base of an inner tower. The island, called Stopfenreuther Au, is located on the left bank of the Danube, in fact in the Barbaricum, opposite today's Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, but slightly to the north-east of the ancient legionary camp of Carnuntum. Excavations began towards the end of the vegetation season in order to minimise disturbance to wildlife, as the ruins lie on the floodplain, under 0.5-0.8 m of sediment, which is now completely covered by a vast riverine forest.
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| The fine-grained Danube sediment, which covered the ruins in thick layers, is clearly visible. |
The Boris flood on the Danube in September delayed and hampered the work, but the excavation was completed in November, the trenches were reburied and, despite the fact that the Roman fortress (unlike Hungary) has been a World Heritage Site in Austria since 2021, the national park has requested that the vegetation be allowed to reoccupy the strictly protected area. This will be followed by an evaluation of the finds, which will hopefully shed light on the circumstances of the fort's construction and destruction, and will allow conclusions to be drawn about the hydrological conditions of the period, since archaeology is currently unable to say for certain on which bank of the river this Roman military camp, which was largely destroyed by the Danube, was originally built.
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| The Stopfenreuth excavation in 2024 as seen from above. |
Erőd-ellenerőd példákat a Duna számos pontjáról ismerünk a római kori Pannoniából, Brigetioval szemben ott állt az izsai Leányvár, Pestről ismert a Március 15. téri erőd, a kisebb kikötőerődökről nem is beszélve (Dunakeszi, Nógrádverőce, Dunaszekcső, stb.) Stopfenreuth-nál alig maradt valami a római erődből, de a meglévő falszakasz alapján egyértelműen látszik, hogy kiserődről van szó, nem pedig kikötőerődről, erre utal a fal íve és az ív belső oldalán épült trapéz alaprajzú torony, sőt a toronyalap helyzete alapján azt is feltételezik, hogy ez nem egy későrómai építmény, amikor a patkó alakú tornyokat az erőd falsíkjához képest kívülre építették.
Examples of fortress and counterfortress pairs are known from many places on the Danube from Roman Pannonia; the fortress of Leányvár in Izsa opposite Brigetiovo, the fortress of Március 15. square in Budapest, not to mention the smaller harbour fortresses (Dunakeszi, Nógrádverőce, Dunaszekcső, etc. ) At Stopfenreuth, hardly anything remains of the Roman fortress, but the existing section of wall clearly indicates that it was a small fortress, not a harbour fortress, as is indicated by the trapezoidal tower built on the inside of the arch and the position of the base of the tower, which suggests that it was not a late Roman structure, when the horseshoe-shaped towers were built outside the wall plane of the fortress.
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| Location of the Ödes Schloss fortress and the ferry crossing on the III. military survey (1870s) |
Although all the remains of the fort are covered in floodplain sediment, the ruins were not unknown to archaeologists, with substantial wall stumps still standing on the bank in the 1860s. Where the Danube had just cut through the walls of the fortress, a cross-section of the stone wall was cropped out perpendicular to the bank, and the places where it was built were referred to by several names, one of the most common being 'Ödes Schloss', or Desolate Castle, a name that also often appears on maps, However, there were also expressive hydrological names, such as 'Hungerstein' or 'Durstkugel', which refers to lean years with significant draughts, as their appearance was probably related to record low water levels.
The archaeological interest in the nearby legionary camp of Carnuntum (Bad Deutsch-Altenburg) and its civilian settlement (Petronell), despite the three kilometre distance, was the main reason why excavations were carried out here relatively early, at the end of the 19th century (1896, 1898, and 1900), when researchers already assumed that it was an important element of the fortified Roman Danubian border (ripa) connected to Carnuntum. The figure below shows the same section of wall as the one excavated in the autumn of 2024. On this site, archaeologists fount the brick stamp of the leg. XV Apollinaris, a legion known to have been stationed in Carnuntum between 9-61 AD and 73-117 AD, i.e. either the camp was built at this time or the building material was reused at a later date.
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| Site plan of the 1898 excavation. |
Between Klosterneuburg and Bratislava, the Danube meandering through the Marchfeld was once a major obstacle to north-south traffic. This 60-kilometer stretch of the Danube cannot be characterised by a single main riverbed, which widens to 4.5 kilometres in places, where the constantly changing pattern of tributaries, backwaters, gravel bars and islands made it virtually impossible to create permanent crossings until the river was regulated. At Carnuntum, however, this Danube floodplain narrowed slightly, with the Kirchenberg limestone block, which emerged as a peninsula, forming a flood-free surface directly on the bank of the main branch, while at Stopfenreuth the floodplain narrowed to 1.7 km. This is still a relatively large distance, but the generally lower Danube water levels of Roman times allowed the establishment of a river crossing, which was an important cross-continent economic artery of antiquity, leading to the Baltic amber deposits from Aquileia.
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| The stump of a section of wall destroyed by the Danube. |
At the time of the first archaeological excavations between 1896 and 1900, the section of the fortress wall formed a spur in the Rosskopf branch of the Danube, and behind it the backwash formed a small bay in the inner part of the fortress. At the end of the 18th century, the Rosskopf branch was even wider than the branch that washed the high bank of the Carnuntum, now the main branch. Generally speaking, the river's course was constantly changing due to its course, and there were no two maps alike in that the islands, gravel bars or the banks are in the same position, which is why the cartographic representation of this stretch is much less accurate than that of other, more stable stretches of the Danube. The confluence of the two branches was generally at the foot of the Kirchenberg, where, according to contemporary maps, a ferry crossing operated. The southern crossing point of the ferry occupied a fixed position in the northern part of Deutsch-Altenburg, but on the northern bank the ferry port was constantly in flux, where it landed on the island surrounded by the Rosskopf branch, but mostly landed at the Ödes Schloss, suggesting that the crossing continued to operate after the loss of the importance of the Amber Road, albeit with less traffic.
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| The route of the Amber Road between Aquileia and the Danube border. |
Geographical considerations were the main reason for the route of the Amber Road between Aquileia and Carnuntum, which avoided mountainous areas impassable in winter and was as close as possible to them, it had to cross as narrow a watercourse as possible in the province of Pannonia, the Sava at Emona (Ljubljana), the Drava at Poetiovo (Ptuj), the Mura and then the Zala at Sala (Zalalövő), the Raba south of Savaria (Szombathely) before reaching the Danube east of Carnuntum (Deutsch-Altenburg). At this point, it is assumed that there was a temporary pontoon bridge, which was replaced by a ferry crossing in the Middle Ages and modern times. After 1951, this was replaced by a cable ferry, which also transported cars. The latter was a relatively brief moment in the history of the crossing, and in January 1973 a new Danube bridge was inaugurated on the site of the crossing, which since 2012 has borne the name of the Lower Austrian Landeshauptmann Andreas Maurer, the only bridge between Vienna and Bratislava to date. The fact that the bridge now crosses the Rosskopf branch where the Roman army built the military camp almost two millennia ago says a lot about the Roman engineers' choice of location.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Source of news, pictures:
- https://www.donauauen.at/aktuelles/news/das-roemische-brueckenkopfkastell-in-der-stopfenreuther-au
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleinkastell_Stopfenreuth
- https://www.lobaumuseum.wien/cms/erinnerung-an-die-rollfaehre-bad-deutsch-altenburg/
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