THE DACIAN KINGDOM
Burebista to Decebalus: kings of Sarmizegetusa Regia
Before Rome arrived, two Dacian kings shaped this capital — Burebista, who founded it, and Decebalus, who defended it against Trajan until it fell in 106 AD.
See Sarmizegetusa Regia tours on GetYourGuide ↗Burebista unites the Dacians
In the first half of the 1st century BC, the Dacian king Burebista brought a patchwork of tribes across the Carpathians and the lower Danube under one rule for the first time, building a kingdom powerful enough to worry Julius Caesar's Rome. Burebista moved the kingdom's sacred and political centre to Sarmizegetusa, in the Orăștie Mountains, laying the groundwork for the fortress and sanctuaries visitors see today. His assassination in 44 BC — the same year as Caesar's — fractured the kingdom into smaller, rival territories for several decades, undoing much of what he had built in a single generation.
Decebalus rebuilds a kingdom
Dacia stayed divided until Decebalus took the throne around 85 AD and reunified it into a single, disciplined state again, with Sarmizegetusa Regia restored as its capital and religious centre. He wasted no time testing Rome, leading raids across the Danube into the province of Moesia and killing its governor, Oppius Sabinus, in one of the opening clashes of what would become a decades-long confrontation. Ancient historians describe him as a genuinely formidable strategist, skilled in both open warfare and negotiation, which is exactly why Trajan eventually needed two full wars, not one, to remove him from power.
Two wars with Trajan
Trajan fought Decebalus in two separate campaigns: the First Dacian War (101–102 AD), which ended in a treaty forcing Decebalus to demolish his own fortifications and accept punitive Roman terms, and the Second Dacian War (105–106 AD), triggered when Decebalus rebuilt his defences and resumed hostilities against the treaty's spirit. The second campaign was fought on a far larger scale, with Trajan bringing overwhelming legionary force and determined this time to end Dacian independence permanently rather than negotiate another uneasy truce. It's this second war that ends at the gates of Sarmizegetusa Regia itself, with no third chance offered.
The fall of the capital, 106 AD
Roman legions besieged Sarmizegetusa Regia in 106 AD, reportedly cutting the water supply feeding the fortress until its defences finally broke under pressure. Decebalus escaped the fall of his capital but, according to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, took his own life rather than be captured when Roman cavalry eventually caught up with him in the surrounding mountains. With Decebalus dead and the capital taken, Dacia was formally annexed as a Roman province — ending one of the longest, hardest-fought and most costly wars of Trajan's entire reign, and reshaping the Carpathian region for centuries afterward.
Trajan's Column, carved in stone
Rome commemorated the victory with Trajan's Column, a 30-metre marble monument still standing in Rome today, wrapped in a spiralling relief frieze roughly 190 metres long that depicts the Dacian campaigns in remarkable, almost documentary detail — sieges, river crossings, Dacian fortress walls, and Decebalus himself shown as a worthy adversary rather than a caricature. Historians treat the column as one of the richest surviving visual records of any ancient war, and it remains the main reason we can picture what Sarmizegetusa Regia's defences looked like in active use, since its carvers clearly worked from genuine campaign accounts and field sketches.
What became of Dacia
After 106 AD, the conquered territory became the Roman province of Dacia, administered from a newly built city roughly 40 kilometres away that Trajan pointedly named after the Dacian capital he had just destroyed. Sarmizegetusa Regia itself was abandoned as a seat of power but never fully erased from memory — its walls, sanctuaries and the Andesite Sun survived quietly under forest cover for nearly two thousand years. Since 1999, UNESCO has protected the site as the most complete surviving trace of the kingdom Burebista founded and Decebalus ultimately died defending against Rome.