Archaeological excavations in the medieval town of Rusokastro for 2024 have been completed

The excavations of the Rusokastro fortress for the current archaeological season have been completed. Archaeologists explored the northwestern fortress wall, and discovered important new facts about the fortification of the medieval city. It turns out that the builders of the wall used the continental rock, cutting it further and carrying out the construction on it. Because the slopes here are extremely large, at some point the construction collapsed on the slope and only imprints of mortar on the rock remained. Thanks to them, a hitherto unknown 25-meter route of the fortress wall was located, starting from the northwest corner of the citadel in the northward direction. The wall itself is extremely massive – it is 3 meters wide, with faces made of large stones with mortar solder, based directly on the rock. Another 27 meters of the preserved construction have been fully explored, with a height of up to 2 m. Extremely massive stone extraction and destruction of the wall in the last hundred years have been found.
During the excavations, a completely new, hitherto unknown rectangular battle tower was discovered. It was built together with the wall in the middle of the 13th century, but after a few decades it was dismantled, and an additional entrance was formed in its place.
Along the outer face of the wall, two graves of babies from the end of the 14th century were found, one of which is not according to the Christian rite. The graves were made in haste, which leads archaeologists to think that it was some kind of extraordinary circumstances during the burial, perhaps an epidemic.
The archaeological team is working outside the fortress wall, but nevertheless a number of movable finds have been found - coins, arrowheads, lead seals and many others. More.
In 2024, the excavations were carried out entirely with the funds of the Municipality of Kameno. For the first time, the Ministry of Culture did not support the excavations. Unfortunately, dozens of archaeological sites in Bulgaria are still in this situation due to the small funds for archaeological research set out in the national budget for 2024.
Therefore, the planned work cannot be carried out, and the effect of this is the delay in the design and implementation of conservation and restoration works. The excavations of the Rusokastro fortress are organized and led by the Regional History Museum - Burgas.

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