Roman found after hiding for 1,600 years as scientists reveal how he met his horrific end

Archaeologists believe they have unraveled a murder mystery 1,600 years after a young Roman's terrifying final moments. A team in present-day Bulgaria has unearthed the skeleton of a person who was apparently hiding inside a giant, clay storage jar in the ancient city of Deultum. Professor Lyudmil Vagalinski of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences said the discovery was made on August 10, and researchers believe the body was a young man who likely suffered a horrific death of suffocation as they tried to escape an invading army who set fire to his city. Vagalinski said: 'The man found refuge in the pitos, crouched there with his knees pressed to his chin and his face facing downwards. He was clutching an iron knife in his right hand, and he also had a second, smaller one, hung from a ring, but he was not a warrior.' The team suspected that this attack was one of several around the year 400 AD, which saw Germanic groups or Huns raid the city of Deultum, putting intense pressure on the Roman Empire until its collapse nearly a century later. The unknown Roman's death was made even more tragic by the fact that no one ever found him inside the jar until the 2026 excavation. The jar was sitting in a small defensive tower at the city's western gate. It is believed the tower was already filling with smoke and ash as raiders set fire to the city. After the victim died from smoke inhalation or lack of oxygen, the wrecked tower was simply flattened and sealed under a new floor, leaving the jar undiscovered for sixteen centuries. The remains of a Roman, believed to be frightened young male, were unearthed 1,600 years after their death Deultum was a Roman colony in the province of Thrace. It was founded by Emperor Vespasian around 70 AD and settled by retired soldiers from the Roman legion. It was one of only two Roman colonies in Thrace and became a prosperous town with baths, streets and defensive walls along the empire's frontier. By the late 300s, however, Deultum had shrunk as a city and was now more heavily fortified than in the past as Rome's enemies neared. Archaeologists believe new walls were created around Deultum after major attacks from 270 AD to the early 300s. The city was raided repeatedly during the next century, and Vagalinski's team believes the young Roman found under the tower died in one of these attacks. 'There are traces of a strong fire, probably caused by an enemy attack, Deultum was attacked repeatedly in the 4th-6th centuries,' Vagalinski said in a statement on Facebook. 'He made no attempts to get out, he probably suffocated in the fire. From now on, we can say that the skeleton is that of a young man, but we will know more after the anthropological analysis,' he added. The jar the young Roman was hiding in was an ordinary container for food, wine or oil, and never served as a coffin in Roman society. Finding a person inside one was considered extremely unusual - suggesting that no one in Deultum knew this person was in there or tried to free them. Researchers believe no one found the young man in the ruins of the city's defensive tower and built over his remains Along with the victim's two knives, the team also found the remnants of a belt, their skull and several bones still intact. Based on their pose in the jar, crouched into a ball, the team said it was clear the young Roman was not in a normal burial pose and was trying to hide in fear of being killed by the fire and the attackers. Around the jar the team found ash, charcoal, blackened walls, melted glass, coins and burned bones from farm animals. Ash under the skeleton suggested that the fire had already started when the young man climbed in. After the attack, the tower was likely in ruins, with burnt walls, fallen roof tiles, ash and rubble. Archaeologists believe the survivors still living in Deultum did not see the jar and treated it as part of the ruined tower, packing it together so the ground was roughly even when the Romans built a replacement tower on the same site. In summer 2026, Vagalinski's team was digging around the northern turret of Deultum's western gate - a small Late Roman defensive tower they recently identified. They were working down through the layers of that building when they reached the burnt level of the older tower from 1,600 years ago and unearthed the broken storage jar still in place. Only the lower part of the giant container survived. Its base was said to be about three feet wide, making it just smaller than the largest Roman storage jars of the era. These clay jars could easily hold over 260 gallons of food or liquids.