Buried beside a stunning blue glᴀss drinking bowl, the woman may have been the first interred at the Roman site, with others eager to be near her in the afterlife.
When a large construction project was launched on Gosposvetska Street in downtown Ljubljana in August 2017, Slovenian archaeologists in this ancient city naturally anticipated some interesting discoveries. But what they didn’t expect to find was an unusual glimpse into an early Christian community, and the important—and as yet unknown—woman its members chose to spend their afterlives close to.
The capital of this small central European country was established as the Roman settlement of Emona some 2,000 years ago, populated by thousands of colonists driven out of northern Italy by land shortages, and joined by veterans of the wars that helped to establish the Empire. From previous excavations in the area, the archaeologists knew that part of a Roman cemetery likely lay under Gosposvetska Street, and that more ancient graves would be uncovered.
The excavations ultimately revealed a late-Roman cemetery complex containing more than 350 burials—ranging from simple graves and sarcophagi to family mausoleums—centered around the burial chapel of what appears to be a very important woman, according to Slovenian archaeologist Andrej Gaspari. The local Christian community flourished after the last major state persecution under Emperor Diocletian in the early 300s, and ended only with the destruction of Emona by the Huns in the fifth century A.D.
