The Directorate for Archaeological Heritage Protection of the Hungarian National Museum (MNM RÖG), in cooperation with the Herman Ottó Museum in Miskolc, conducted archaeological excavations on 17 hectares in 12 locations along the route of the future Miskolc-Kassa motorway between 2018 and 2020. With their research, the experts of the institution have not only uncovered a single site, but have also drawn a cross-section of the Hernád River valley spanning several centuries.
The results of the excavations so far will be used to highlight episodes in the history of this special "chamber of life".
The research of the National Museum shows that the area was already a busy place in the past. The Great Plain pushes into the mountains along the Hernád River at its northernmost point, making the river valley a natural route that for thousands of years provided a link between the Carpathian Basin's interior and northern Europe. Where the floodplain of the Hernád meets the surrounding hills, a long chain of settlements has developed along the contact line of these disparate landscapes in archaeological times. The side valleys of the streams flowing into the river valley from the right and left, with their entrances overlooking the Hernád plain, offered very good opportunities for settlement. The most archaeologically significant of these chambers of life is the area around Encs, the rest area of the planned motorway at Forrás Hill. Halfway between the Miskolc gate of the Hernád Valley and the Kassai Basin, where the motorway service area is now being built, there was once an inn, and even earlier a cemetery dating back to the conquest of the conquered land, and before that the Scythians and the inhabitants of a fortified Bronze Age settlement thought it the best place to settle. The Hernád valley was similarly popular in the Neolithic period, as evidenced by traces of early farmers on the borders of present-day Garadna and Novajidrány. Also in Garadna, a part of a Germanic, Vandal settlement has been excavated, where dozens of coal-burning pits suggest that most of the population was engaged in coal-burning.
The excavations in the Hernád Valley are still only brief diary entries in the history of the Carpathian Basin, but each site reveals more and more about the millennia that have passed.
Creators of the virtual exhibition:
Raugures and reconstructions: József Bicskei, Ágnes Kazsóki, Mária Kovács
Photographs of objects and aerial photographs: József Bicskei, Tamás Látos, László Pokorni
Curators: Dr. Szilvia Fábián, Szabolcs Czifra
Graphics: Karolina Taivainen
Virtual exhibition: Krisztina Farkas, Rita Kovács
Coordinator: Éva Kómár