---
title: "At Apulum, the gate of Legio XIII Gemina lay four metres under a medieval one"
description: "In Alba Iulia, excavators found the Porta Praetoria of a Roman legionary fortress, its foundations reused for the medieval St. George Gate"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-06T21:00:47Z
modified: 2026-10-07T10:33:33Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/at-apulum-the-gate-of-legio-xiii-gemina-lay-four-metres-unde-290ad1
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "rome", "military", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# At Apulum, the gate of Legio XIII Gemina lay four metres under a medieval one

*In Alba Iulia, excavators found the Porta Praetoria of a Roman legionary fortress, its foundations reused for the medieval St. George Gate*

By Jan Sokol · October 6, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/at-apulum-the-gate-of-legio-xiii-gemina-lay-four-metres-unde-290ad1

## In brief

- Archaeologists in Alba Iulia, Romania, identified the Porta Praetoria, main eastern gate of Legio XIII Gemina’s fortress at Apulum
- A tower’s foundation platform was found about four metres deep on the Capistrano Bastion, some 40 years after the southern gate
- Comparison with the 1986 southern gate suggests two rectangular towers, a central wall and two arched passages in opus quadratum
- The Roman foundations were reused in the medieval St. George Gate, through which Michael the Brave entered the fortress in 1599
- The dig is run by the National Museum of the Union with Alba County Council support and coordinated by Anca Timofan

Alba Iulia sits above the Mureș river, and under its star-shaped citadel lie the ruins of every power that ever held the town. On the Capistrano Bastion, archaeologists have now dug about four metres down and reached the oldest of them. [As Leman Altuntaş reported for *Arkeonews*](https://arkeonews.net/archaeologists-discover-the-main-gate-of-romes-xiii-gemina-legionary-fortress-at-apulum/), the team has identified the Porta Praetoria, the main eastern gate of the fortress held by Legio XIII Gemina, one of the chief Roman units stationed in Dacia.

Romanian outlets carried the news on 22 September, [Știri pe surse reported](https://www.stiripesurse.ro/archaeologists-in-alba-iulia-discover-main-gate-of-the-roman-fortress-of-apulum_3922146), and [Radio România’s local service](https://www.radioromania.ro/stiri-locale/alba-arheologii-au-descoperit-poarta-principala-a-castrului-roman-de-la-apulum-id220631.html) also announced it. The find comes about forty years after the camp’s southern gate was found in 1986.

## A platform of stone

What came out of the ground was a foundation rather than an arch: the massive platform of one of the gate towers. The research coordinator, the archaeologist Anca Timofan, described it as “the massive foundation platform of one of the towers, discovered at a depth of four metres.” Little survives above it. Even so, the platform is large enough to show the size and layout of the entrance.

To picture the rest, the archaeologists turned to the southern gate, the Porta Principalis Dextra, found in 1986 and later partly reconstructed. Comparing the two suggests that the main gate was built on a grand scale: two large rectangular towers, a dividing wall between them and two arched passageways. The builders used opus quadratum, the Roman method of laying big, carefully dressed stone blocks in regular courses. At Apulum the stone was limestone, cut in heavy blocks of the kind a permanent legionary base would need.

The gate also tells you how the camp was laid out. “Through the Porta praetoria, Via praetoria led to the headquarters building (principia),” Timofan said. A soldier or a petitioner coming in from the east walked a straight road to the place where orders were given.

One may reflect that empires show themselves in such lines. A legion’s main gate was built to impress people as much as to stop them, and its road ran straight to the headquarters.

## The gate that changed masters

The Romans left. The gate’s foundations stayed. The excavation confirmed that later builders reused them and built them into the medieval St. George Gate. In Timofan’s words, these are “two monumental structures from different periods, built at the same strategic point.” The ruins of the medieval gate had been found in September 2025. That season, researchers also identified the basement level of the gate tower through which Michael the Brave entered the fortress of Bălgrad, as Alba Iulia was then called, in 1599. Work in the area started again in September 2026.

The link between the two gates was never quite forgotten. Foreign travellers in the seventeenth century had already noted that the medieval gate was Roman in origin. The chronicler Wolfgang Bethlen placed it on the east side, facing the Mureș and Ampoi rivers and protected by a barbican. Above the entrance, he wrote, was an image of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the she-wolf, “probably a Roman relic.”

For three and a half centuries his remark could only be read. Now it can be checked against the stone.

## Four rulers in three trenches

The bastion has three trenches, and they cut through four periods. At the bottom is the Roman fortress of the second and third centuries AD. Above it lies the early medieval period, from the ninth to the twelfth century. Next comes the Principality of Transylvania in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and on top the Habsburg works of the eighteenth and nineteenth. In this one place on a hill, each ruler found the last one’s walls in the ground and built on them.

Here is a thought, offered as a thought and no more: a regime falls, but a good foundation outlasts it, because the next ruler rarely has a better place to put his gate. The legion chose the spot for its own reasons. The medieval town took it over, and Michael the Brave came in through it. The masters changed. The ground they built on did not.

## The military heart of Dacia

Apulum grew up around the fortress of Legio XIII Gemina, which became a permanent base after Rome conquered Dacia in the early second century CE. The army brought civilian settlements, public buildings, workshops and roads. In time Apulum became one of the largest Roman communities north of the Danube, where the province’s military network met its trade and administration.

With several gates now fixed in place, archaeologists can redraw the fortress plan. They can trace how people moved through the camp, how the main roads met at the headquarters, and how the fortress sat within the town that grew up around it. Other Roman military sites have been giving up their buildings this autumn too, among them [a temple to Mars at Kapersburg](https://rews.cc/a/german-archaeologists-find-roman-temple-to-mars-at-kapersbur-9d533e) on Germany’s old frontier.

The dig is run by the National Museum of the Union in Alba Iulia, with support from the Alba County Council, and Timofan coordinates it. For now, what it has is one tower’s foundation, four metres down, under a medieval gate that once held a picture of a wolf feeding two boys. Bethlen took that picture to be Roman. Nobody can yet say whether he was right.