Dacian Fortresses of the Orăștie Mountains
The number of Wikipedia languages with an article is our measure of how widely known a site is. How many people have stood at a site or want to go will be shown once enough people use the app.
Seals, your want-to-go list and the year you stood here are kept in the iPhone app.
How it came to be
The Dacian Fortresses of the Orăștie Mountains are six strongholds at the foot of a spur of the Transylvanian Alps in west-central Romania. The Dacian kingdom built them in the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD as protection against Roman conquest. They are Sarmizegetusa Regia, Costești-Cetățuie, Costești-Blidaru, Piatra Roșie, Bănița and Căpâlna, which together formed the core of King Decebalus's defences.
Late in his reign King Burebista moved the capital from Argedava to Sarmizegetusa, which reached its height under Decebalus. On a hill about 1,200 m high it had walls, a sacred precinct and settlements, with drinking water carried in ceramic pipes. The sacred area held rectangular temples and circular sanctuaries, and the smithies have yielded some 400 metal tools such as scythes and ploughshares. The fortresses combine military and religious ideas from the classical world with the building methods of the late European Iron Age.
In AD 102, at the end of the First Dacian War, Trajan's Roman army partly pulled down the walls of Sarmizegetusa, and after the siege of 105 to 106 the capital fell. The fortresses were conquered by Rome at the start of the 2nd century, and the Romans built a new capital, Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa, some 40 km away. The fortresses were inscribed in 1999.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).