Your sunrise at Sarmizegetusa

Your day

Your Sun, over the real ridge

At the spring equinox the Sun clears the ridge at an azimuth of 98.6°, 52 minutes after the time a flat plain would give.

You are standing on the andesite disc on the sanctuary terrace, about 990 metres up in the Orăștie Mountains. To the east the ground does not stop at the horizon line: it rises. Your Sun has to climb over the forested ridge before you see it.

The faint mark below the ridge shows where the Sun would appear if the ground were flat, the way sunrise tables reckon it. The gap between the two points is the whole story below.

The mountain

To the east the horizon stands 5–9.2 degrees high

Along the arc where the Sun rises through the year, from north-east in summer to south-east in winter, the ridge stands between 5 and 9.2 degrees above eye level, 1.7–7.8 kilometres away.

Here the Sun needs 6–7 minutes to climb one degree, and on its slanting path it also moves south as it rises. So here sunrise comes, depending on the day, 42–56 minutes later than on a plain, and 7.6–10 degrees further south.

The terrain is a 30 m surface model that includes the forest canopy. Lower all the terrain beyond 250 metres by 20 metres, about the height of the trees, and the midwinter sunrise moves only from 131.6° to 131.2°.

The solstice

A solstice line drawn on paper aims at a sunrise that cannot be seen from here

One published claim says the axis of the Great Round Sanctuary's apse "fronts the point where the sun rises at the winter solstice". The 2009 paper gives no angle and does not mention the terrain.

On a flat horizon around AD 100 the midwinter Sun would rise at 124°. From the terrace it appears only at 131.6°, 42 minutes later, after climbing 5.7 degrees. Any "alignment" worked out on paper without the mountain aims at a point behind the ridge.

Even the apse's direction is unsettled. Aurora Pețan writes that its tip points to the solstice sunset, not the sunrise. On a 2014 plan, an unscaled drawing with a north arrow, the apse tip sits at about 150°, further south than the Sun rises here on any day of the year. The plan does not say whether its north is true north.

The lines

How many lines does it take for the stones to point at your day?

The andesite disc has ten rays. Those who read it as an astronomical instrument put them "approximately 36 degrees" apart, one pointing north; the same paper notes that the arcs differ. Take them at their word anyway.

With the ten rays and a tolerance of 2 degrees, 37 days out of 365 have an "aligned" sunrise.

With every line on the terrace and a 5-degree tolerance, almost two days in five have their sunrise "caught" by a stone. The apse axis adds nothing: it points further south than the Sun ever rises here. A match you can find on so many days does not prove anyone was looking for it.

The calendar

The calendar was counted from 68 posts. The dig found 84 post holes

The Great Round Sanctuary is 29.40 metres across. In 1963 Georges Charrière counted its rings from Hadrian Daicoviciu's 1960 description: a kerb of 104 andesite blocks, 210 stones in 30 groups of six tall and one low, a circle of 68 timber posts and, in the middle, an apse of 34 posts. The "Dacian calendar" was built from those numbers.

The numbers only work if they are right. Excavations in 1980, carried out for the restoration, found 84 post holes in the timber ring, not 68, set at irregular intervals. "So the whole calendar story fell apart," writes Aurora Pețan. The posts were most likely set inside clay walls, out of sight.

The figure of 84 is given here after Aurora Pețan; we did not find the 1980 excavation report in print.

The hill

The wall you see at Sarmizegetusa today was built by the Romans

The Dacian fortress stood on the summit of the hill, at 1,042 metres, and covered about one hectare by one estimate; another gives 1.66 hectares. The wars with Rome and the levelling that followed destroyed it almost entirely: only a small stretch of its wall is still visible, and the Romans altered even that. The wall visible today, mostly of limestone blocks, encloses about three hectares and is Roman, from the early second century. Some stretches have pieces of andesite from the sanctuaries built into them.

From the fortress a road paved with limestone slabs ran east to the sacred terrace, at about 1,000 metres. Beneath the line of the wall, 38 metres from the south gate, a Roman smithy came to light, and beneath it a Dacian mint that burned in AD 106.

Today: the Roman wall, in ruins, and the sanctuaries as restored in 1980.

The usual reading places the fall of the capital in 106, at the end of the second war. Aurora Pețan reads the latest excavations differently: the capital was taken and destroyed as early as 102, after the first war. The two interpretations differ for the years 102–106. Cassius Dio writes that after the peace of 102 Decebalus had to "demolish the forts", and that Trajan left "the camp at Zermizegethusa".

The terraces

How many terraces does Sarmizegetusa have? The counts range from over 50 to about 430

On the sunny slopes of the hill the Dacians cut platforms into the mountain for houses, workshops and barns. The largest, inside the fortress, covers about 10,000 square metres, and the largest of the sanctuary terraces about 8,500. Most are small: 245 of 373 are under 500 square metres, and some barely 30.

The counts changed as research covered more ground. The topographic survey begun in 2006 found 262 terraces in the two civil quarters alone. In November 2011, while a BBC documentary was being made, an airborne LiDAR scan, whose laser measures the ground beneath the forest, covered about 100 square kilometres and allowed about 430 terraces and house platforms to be identified. The 2025 count uses the national cadastre agency's LiDAR model, checked on the ground, and reaches 373 terraces. Its authors warn that neither the number nor the areas are absolute values.

Some terraces can no longer be counted. Two landslides in the eastern quarter affected more than 50,000 square metres, and one in the west at least 30,000: they broke terraces apart and probably made others disappear. The 1980 restoration shrank the sanctuary terraces, and forest roads cut through others. Across the whole Grădiște valley, as far as Costești, the same authors count about 1,500 terraces and plateaus with ancient remains, an estimate they consider only close to the number in antiquity.

The stones

What is left once the stories are gone

A lot. The andesite disc is 6.98 metres across, with a 1.46-metre centre and ten rays averaging 2.76 metres. The 1996 paper that measured it called it, cautiously, "a possible sundial"; a 1994 paper read it as a sacrificial altar. Neither reading is proven.

The site has been through many digs and changes of mind. The Austrian administration dug here for gold in 1803 and 1804. Constantin Daicoviciu, who directed the excavations, first read the rectangular buildings as granaries, then changed his mind and declared them temples. A 2019 synthesis, after Everett Wheeler, calls the whole architecture an "archaeological nightmare".

In 1999 the six Dacian fortresses of the Orăștie Mountains became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. What we know for sure fits in the measurements. What went on upon the stones is still an open question.

The god and the king

The god has one source. The king has a vase

The link between the sanctuaries and Zalmoxis comes from modern books. The only informed ancient source is Herodotus (Histories 4.93–96), who heard the story from the Greeks of the Black Sea and neither fully believes nor wholly rejects it. Beyond the literary versions, one scholar notes, there is "absolutely no data" for a real cult. In the sources checked, no inscription from Sarmizegetusa Regia bears his name.

Aurora Pețan transcribes the vessel's inscription as DECEBALVS PER SCORILO; in modern orthography, DECEBALUS PER SCORILO. Its meaning is disputed; one common interpretation is "Decebalus, son of Scorilo". The capital belonged to a kingdom, for about a century and a half, from Burebista's move from Argedava to the Roman conquest, in 106 or, on one recent reading, as early as 102.

Your morning

When the light arrives at Sarmizegetusa on your day

At the equinox the light clears the ridge at 07:21, Romanian time.

If you go, take your time from the calculation above, which accounts for the ridge. And if you too have hills, blocks or mountains to the east, look tomorrow morning: the Sun appears behind them, so later than the flat-horizon sunrise time.