Lepenski Vir

You may get settled comfortably around the village on an opening of the Danube surrounded by the greenish mountains. The archaeological site has been 14 km upstream, and the Table of Trayan 14 km downstream. Your fall point would be the same hotel of "Lepenski Vir".

In the gorge of Djerdap the most ancient Neolithic site in Europe had been discovered in 1965: a prehistorically village from 8000 years before our era. At the very level of the water, the site has been limited enough because it represented only 3000 m^{2, but the archaeologists agreed to say it was the most complete from this period of the prehistory. First, one may see here the lowest structures. There are about a hundred houses between 8000 to 4000 B.C. average. They have go a trapezoid design and had been constructed with the red bricks and the limestone from the environment. Because of the fragile ground the greatest majority of had been laid on the little stone plates or had been buried into the earth.}

But the emblematical figure of the Lepenski Vir has been a statue of a great size having been found in a house. Of an oblong shape, this statue of stone has represented three views of the human face, with a round head dominating two styled faces. The symbolic and their respective places on the stone make believe in the shamanism cult. Moreover there have been found a great number of skeletons in a necropolis or under the houses, as well as the numerous confessional objects made of the bone (needles, knives, arms) witnessing a high degree of civilisation of this Neolithic tribe.

The site may be seen every day with the copies of the divers objects an the statues in a little adjacent museum (the original being in the National Museum in Belgrade). But the houses, their arrangements, as well as the configuration have been worthy the place.

At 28 km downstream from Donji Milanovac had been profiled the Table of Trayan, one of the Roman period particularities on the Danube. On the rocky wall it had been chiselled in a great framework supported by two figures in bas-relief representing the deities: those winged surrounding a Roman eagle and supported by a dolphin. The inscription had been dedicated to remember the first Trayan’s battle against Thrakes 103 of our era.

In spite of its impressive dimensions – 3.60m 1.75 m – the table has not been visible any more, a consequence of the elevation of the Danube level. In 1970 it was needed to cut it off to elevate it for 17 m, above the level of the river and to put it on another rocky elevation.

Next to there one still could see the parts of a Roman road being tailored in the rock and being stretched 15 miles. One had been enterprised to construct it under the rule of the Emperor Trayan in 102. This road had a strategic importance of the first rank because it had given the Romans a passage to the territory of Dakia, but is had been a natural defence in the North of the Roman Empire.

One should know that the road had ended at the present village of Kostolac where the architect of the Emperor Apolodor had constructed a bridge bridging the Danube to enter the territory of Dakia, being 1000 meters long and reposing onon 20 solid columns.