Virunum

Stand still for a moment and listen. Wind moves across a wide, flat field. A car passes on a nearby road, then the quiet returns. Under your feet the ground looks like ordinary Carinthian farmland, with meadows and furrows and long views to the hills. Yet just below this soil lie the streets, temples and public buildings of a Roman city. You are standing on the Zollfeld, a broad plain north of Klagenfurt, and this place was once Virunum.

Virunum was not a small frontier outpost. For a long period it was the capital of Noricum, a Roman province that covered much of what is now Austria and parts of its neighbours. The governor ruled from here. Officials, merchants, soldiers and craftsmen walked these streets. Today almost nothing stands above ground. That absence is the first surprise of Virunum: a provincial capital that disappeared so completely that farmers ploughed over it for centuries.

To understand why the city was built here, look toward the hills. Not far away rises the Magdalensberg, a mountain where an earlier settlement once stood. Before the Romans took full control, the region belonged to the Celtic kingdom of Noricum, and that hilltop town was a major centre of trade. When the area became a formal Roman province in the first century, the Romans moved the main town down into the valley. A city on the plain was easier to supply, easier to reach, and better suited to Roman roads.

The new city carried the name of the emperor Claudius. Its formal title was the Municipium Claudium Virunum. In Roman terms, a municipium was a town with its own legal status and local government. That name tells us the city was a deliberate project of the imperial state, not a village that slowly grew. Streets were laid out in a regular grid, in the Roman manner. The plan reflected a familiar idea: order on the ground showed order in the empire.

Now imagine the city at its height. There was a forum, the large open square at the heart of every Roman town, used for markets, politics and religion. There were temples, baths and houses with painted walls. There was a theatre for plays and public gatherings. And there was an amphitheatre, the oval arena where crowds watched fights and spectacles. Each of these buildings has been located by archaeologists, even though most now lie hidden beneath grass.

The amphitheatre is the part of Virunum that many visitors come to see. It was only identified and excavated in recent decades, which surprised many people. For generations, scholars knew a great city had stood here, but they did not know exactly where its arena was. When excavators finally uncovered it, they found the curving outline of the walls set into the slope of the land. Seeing that oval shape in an open field helps the mind rebuild the rest of the vanished city.

Think for a moment about who sat in those seats. Roman Virunum was a meeting place of peoples. Local Celtic families lived alongside settlers and officials from Italy and other provinces. Inscriptions found here record many gods. Some were Roman, some were local, and some came from the far eastern edge of the empire. Soldiers and traders brought cults like that of Mithras, a mysterious god worshipped in small underground halls. This mix of beliefs was normal in a busy Roman capital.

Here is something many visitors miss. Much of Virunum did not simply vanish — it moved. After the city declined in late antiquity, its stones became a convenient quarry. People in the surrounding area carried away carved blocks, inscriptions and reliefs for their own buildings. If you drive a short distance to the pilgrimage church of Maria Saal, look closely at its outer walls. Roman stones, some with carved figures and Latin letters, are built straight into the masonry.

The second surprise sits on this same plain. Not far from here stands the Herzogstuhl, the Duke's Chair, a stone throne linked to the medieval rulers of Carinthia. It is a double seat made of rough blocks. Historians believe it was assembled from Roman stone, very likely taken from the ruins of Virunum. So the old capital of a Roman province helped to build a symbol of a new medieval power. The Zollfeld carried authority from one age into the next.

What happened to the city itself? Like many towns in the western Roman provinces, Virunum faced hard times as the empire weakened. Invasions, unrest and economic decline changed life across the region. The city remained important into the Christian era, and records mention bishops connected with Virunum in late antiquity. Over time, however, the population left, and the buildings fell. By the early Middle Ages the capital had faded into fields, and its memory lived on mainly in stones and names.

If you want to see the objects people used here, travel back into Klagenfurt. The Carinthian state museum holds many finds from Virunum and the Magdalensberg. These include inscriptions, sculptures, mosaics and everyday items. A carved tombstone with a family portrait can feel far more personal than a ruined wall. A small bronze figure or a piece of painted plaster shows the colour and taste of the people who lived on this plain. The field and the museum work best together.

While you are here, take in the landscape as the Romans saw it. The plain is wide and gentle, with the Glan river running through the valley. Wooded hills frame the horizon on several sides. Roads have crossed this ground for a very long time, because it is a natural route between north and south. The Romans chose well. Even today, the main route between Klagenfurt and the towns to the north runs along this same valley floor.

There is also something quietly moving about the emptiness. In many old cities, modern buildings cover every trace of the past. Here, the opposite happened. The land returned to farming, and that is why archaeologists can still study so much of the plan. Aerial photographs and survey work have shown lines of streets and buildings in the soil. The fields are not a loss. In a way, they protected Virunum.

Before you leave, look once more across the Zollfeld. Notice the line of the hills, the colour of the grass, the slight rises in the ground that might hide a wall. Somewhere beneath you is a street where people once bought bread and argued about taxes. As you walk back toward the road, listen again to the wind across the plain... and remember that you have just crossed the centre of a Roman capital.