THE GERMANIC PEOPLES
25th June 2016 – 18th December 2016
György Thúry Museum
The exhibition shows the impressive – newly found – artefacts which form part of the relics from Vas County originating from the early stage of the Migration Period. The cemetery – containing a high number of graves – has been excavated on the confines of Szeleste. It hid warriors and richly bejeweled women.
An ever growing number of various peoples of Germanic and eastern origin occupied the peripheral regions of the Roman Empire during the centuries of its slow decline. In the 5th century, the Huns ruled over the town of Savaria and the area belonging to it, the territorium, which consisted of villa rustica farms and cultivated land, for a short time. At the same time, a part of the inhabitants of the town of mainly local origin, who had received Roman citizenship (civitas Romana), left the once prospering town in several waves.
The Huns, the Ostrogoths, the Scirii, the Suevi, the Heruli and other peoples that turned up here in the 4th and 5th centuries left almost no apparent marks on the environs. Isolated graves and sporadic finds remained from this era the artistically processed precious metal finds of which found – almost without exception – their way into national or international museums.
According to our current knowledge, the Langobards that belonged to the Germanic ethnic group occupied today’s Transdanubia gradually at the beginning of the 6th century. We know very little about their settlements and a little over a dozen of their cemeteries have been excavated by archaeologists. We had not had information about permanent settlements of the Germanic peoples in Vas County up until the time when we got acquainted with the cemetery of Szeleste. Based upon our knowledge so far, we only assumed that there had been a network of roads in the Roman era and armed forces small in number that had been settled here to control the long-distance trade that had took place on these roads.
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