A unique private bath has been discovered at the fortified palace of Roman Emperor Maximinus Daza at the Vrelo-Šarkamen site, near the town of Negotin, Serbia. The imperial balneum (private bath) was located in the bottom floor of the palace’s southwest tower, part of the defenses of the villa. There is no other known example of a private bath installed in a defensive tower in Serbia or anywhere else in the former Roman Empire.
What makes this bath so unusual is its design: it is circular, like the tower itself, and was divided into two areas: an equipment room that contained all the heating mechanisms and a suite of rooms with three pools and a sudatorium (sauna or steam room). The technical section contained a praefurnium, the furnace chamber used to heat the floors of bathing rooms. The base of the copper boiler used to heat the water for the hot pools was discovered there, although the boiler is gone, probably melted down for reuse in antiquity.
Of particular importance is the exceptional state of preservation of the hypocaust system, with its circular pilae, through which hot air circulated under the floors of the various rooms. This level of preservation of the heating system, along with the very discovery of the imperial balneum, represents an extremely rare archaeological find and provides invaluable data for understanding the operation of the thermal complex. […]
The personnel in charge of maintaining the bath and feeding the praefurnium accessed the technical sector of the tower from the western side, through a monumental entrance. This layout allowed the service area to be separated from the part of the balneum intended for the residence’s occupants.
Born in Felix Romuliana, near modern-day Gamzigrad, Serbia, in what was then the province of Dacia, Maximinus Daza was adopted by Galerius, his maternal uncle when he became Augustus of the eastern Empire in 305 A.D. (The Tetrarchy, the system that divided the Roman Empire into an Eastern and Western Empire each ruled by a senior emperor (Augustus) and a junior emperor (Caesar) was established by Diocletian in 286 A.D. to stabilize government after the Crisis of the Third Century.) Maximinus Daza was Eastern Caesar under Galerius from 305 A.D. until 310 A.D. He began to style himself Augustus a year before Galerius died, but divided the Eastern Empire with Licinius and was constantly in conflict with him. Daza was defeated conclusively at the Battle of Tzirallum (modern-day Turkey) in April, 313, and died a few months later.
* This article was originally published here
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