Aquincum Museum

In AD 228 Gaius Julius Viatorinus, a councillor of the colonia, gave a portable organ to the guild of textile dealers, whose other job in town was spotting and fighting fires. It was small enough to carry, probably built of wood, leather, bronze and copper, with 52 pipes in four rows of thirteen. Its Latin name says water organ, though whether it was worked by water or by air has never been settled.

In the middle of the 3rd century a fire swept the civil town and burned out the firemen’s own hall, the organ fell into the cellar and stayed there until 1931, when Lajos Nagy turned up nearly 400 whole and broken pieces while digging foundations for an electricity substation. The war lost many of them and barely 300 remain.

The surviving parts, a model of the structure and a working reconstruction are shown together, in a building that stands on the spot where they were found. This is the best thing in the museum, and it is upstairs, so do not run out of time downstairs.

The approach to the museum runs along the line of the Roman main road, which is still the main road. Szentendrei út follows it. The Esplanade is the museum’s own introduction to the site, and all of it is outside the ticket barrier.

Look for the coloured stepping stones marking where the ancient street crossings were, the pavement markings showing where the town gate stood, and the portraits of the emperors who mattered to Pannonia. The benches carry motifs lifted from Aquincum’s own frescoes and mosaics. The monumental bronze gate has the plan of the civil town on it, and under the grating beneath it is a cut section of Roman road.

Set into the paving on the way to the ticket office is a funerary poem from an Aquincum sarcophagus. Give the Esplanade ten minutes on the way in rather than walking it twice.

The newest permanent exhibition, open since September 2023, is about military life along the Aquincum frontier, and it is the one to put time aside for. Aquincum was a border town of the empire for some 400 years, and the legionary fortress two kilometres south of here held a heavy infantry unit of nearly 6,000 men.

Three objects earn the visit. The Drusus stone was for a long time the evidence for an Augustan occupation of Pannonia and is now known to record the building of the Óbuda cavalry fort in AD 73. A suit of Roman armour, put together from fragments, is on show for the first time. And the painted wall of the Mithras shrine from the legionary fortress, almost 2,000 years old, is shown in an interior that evokes the shrine, with the altars found alongside it.

The rest is built for being walked through rather than read. Virtual reality takes you into the main street of a legionary fortress, a barrack block, a bathhouse and a shrine, a sound panel plays ancient instruments, and there is a games corner with Roman board games. Follow Salvius, the little eagle, through ten stages from egg to grave and you have the career of a soldier stationed here, which is the easiest way to take children round.

Two reconstructed Roman buildings stand in the southern half of the park, and they are the only places on the site where you are inside Roman rooms rather than looking down at their outlines.

The House of the Painter is a strip-building rebuilt several times between the early 2nd century and the middle of the 3rd, its rooms on different levels because the ground slopes.

The central part is the bit you walk through, furnished in the Roman style: the porch, the entrance corridor, two living rooms, the atrium, the kitchen, the dining room and the reception hall. The painted rooms the house is named after ran off a corridor along its northern side, and they are not part of the walk.

The Symphorus mithraeum was rebuilt in 2017 and 2018 under a protective building of natural stone, meant to feel like the cave a Mithras shrine was supposed to suggest, and the exhibition inside opened in June 2018.

Follow the museum’s own directions to it. Take the small path from the southern gate of the park, past the House of the Painter. The shrine opens from the east, so go round the building, and mind the slight level change.

In winter both open for ten minutes at a time, three times a day, and only if the ground is dry. In summer they are open all day, which is the simplest argument for coming between April and October.

The two best details on the site are both at ankle height. In the large public baths, count rooms from the changing room, which is marked with the figure of a Roman citizen going in. In the fourth, steps lead down to a cross-section of the underfloor heating.

You can see the volcanic rock pillars that held the floor up, with the space between them where hot air and soot circulated before escaping through the hollow bricks lining the walls. Look rather than climb. Going between the pillars or into the ducts is against the house rules.

The other is on the walk from the artisans’ quarter to the macellum, the meat market. Check the stones on the corners of the small streets to your right. On one corner the slabs covering the sewer carry a deep rut, worn by cart wheels turning in day after day towards the market entrance.

You will walk straight past both unless you know they are there.

About ten minutes from the museum gate, outside what was the northern town wall, is the smaller of Aquincum’s two amphitheatres. It stands in the open at Szentendrei út 150 and the museum sells no ticket for it, so it costs you only the walk and the crossing.

It is an earth amphitheatre, which means the seating bank was built by ramming earth between two ring walls, and some of the stone benches on it carried their owners’ names. Almost circular at 86.5 m by 75.5 m, it held 6,000 to 7,000 people, who reached the partly covered stands up a ramp on the outside, and the arena was ringed by a wall 3 m high with a gate at either end.

The gladiator barracks stood beside it, and on the south side of the western gate was a shrine of Nemesis, goddess of the games, where a fragment of her statuette and several inscribed altars were found.

In use by the middle of the 2nd century, it was rebuilt several times in the 3rd and did more than gladiators and animal hunts. It was the biggest space in town, so it held assemblies, civic festivals and speeches for a visiting emperor. Pair it with the aqueduct arches and you have a good hour after the museum closes.