Urbs paludarum – Mosapurc
Zalavár-Vársziget in the Carolingian age
MúzeumCafé 3.
One of the largest sand drift hills formed in the late Ice Age, Zalavár-Vársziget, rises like an island in the Zala river valley. In the second half of the 9th century epoch-forming events occurred here, an area accessible only by wooden roads. At the beginning of the 830s Priwina turned for protection to the region’s new super power, the Carolingian Empire. The eastern Frankish monarch, Louis the German, first made Priwina vassal over a part of Lower Pannonia at the river Zala around 838-40 and in 847 gave it over to Priwina’s full ownership. Zalavár-Vársziget, identified in some sources as urbs paludarum, Mosapurc, i.e. Marsh Castle, became the regional centre. The Hungarian National Museum has organised explorations here since the end of the 1940s. The settlement structure of Vársziget is becoming clearer due to excavations undertaken for the past one and a half decades by the museum together with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Archeology. The aim has been to definitively explore the large uninterrupted surfaces found here.