A lead Venus is the first religious object ever found in this Roman village

Archaeologists from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) lifted a lead statuette of Venus, found with a metal detector in a forest at Pilisszentiván near Budapest, during the fourth excavation season at the site, which closed on 23 September 2026. It is the first religious object recorded at the Roman village that once stood there.

The figure is of the Venus Pudica type, the modest pose in which the goddess covers herself with her hands. Before its discovery, nothing from the settlement could be tied to cult or belief.

The First Sign of Religion in the Vicus

The excavation is led by Bence Simon of the Department of Ancient Archaeology in the ELTE Institute of Archaeology, and the institute’s announcement carries the central claim. HeritageDaily’s report on the find relays it as the first known religious monument discovered within the vicus, while the Hungarian coverage uses slightly different nouns. The news site hvg quotes the institute calling it the first known religious artifact from the settlement area, and Origo renders the Hungarian phrasing as the first religious-related object to come out of the vicus.

The wording matters for how far the claim reaches. It covers what the four seasons of excavation have recovered so far, not every object that may lie in the unexcavated ground, and no source says whether the statuette was a household offering or part of a shrine.

A vicus was a village or rural settlement without the status of a town, and this one lies in the Hárs forest in the Buda Hills. According to La Brújula Verde, which drew on the university’s press release, the settlement sits near the Hársas spring in the northwestern hinterland of Aquincum, the Roman city whose ruins lie in the Óbuda district of modern Budapest.

Aquincum’s Hinterland

Aquincum began as a military base on the Danube frontier of Pannonia, with a cavalry unit arriving between AD 41 and 54 and a legion stationed there by AD 89, and its encyclopedia entry puts the population at 30,000 or more by the end of the second century. A city of that size needed farms, workshops and way stations around it, and the Pilisszentiván settlement belongs to that agricultural belt.

The Venus Pudica pose descends from the famous Aphrodite of Knidos by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles in the fourth century BC, a composition that Roman workshops copied for centuries in marble, bronze and cheaper materials. A lead version is a modest member of that family. Its value to the excavators lies less in artistry than in what it shows about the people who lived at the site, because a settlement with a spring, buildings and steady daily traffic would be expected to have had some form of worship, and until this season the dig had produced nothing that showed it.

Hungarian coverage appeared on 30 September, a week after the season ended, and it stresses that the metal-detector find surfaced in the same campaign that produced the mirror, tools and coins. Because the figurine is lead, a detector is the natural tool for locating it, and its position relative to the buildings and the collapse layer has yet to be described in public. The researchers describe the Venus as the first such object recorded so far, which leaves open whether a shrine or household cult place still lies elsewhere in the unexcavated ground.

Mirror, Tongs and Coins Beside the Goddess

The statuette was not alone. The team recovered a fragment of a leaded-bronze mirror, iron tools, fibulae, which are the brooches Romans used to fasten clothing, and coins. Stone slabs marked paved areas, and the pottery included complete vessels. Among the iron finds was an intact pair of tongs, which came from a collapse layer in Building E and may help show how the building was used day to day.

Each of those objects points to ordinary routines: a mirror to personal grooming, fibulae to clothing, and tongs to work with fire or metal. Finds from a collapse layer are valued because they were left where they were last used, though the researchers have not yet published an interpretation of Building E.

Those pieces were found by a mixed crew. ELTE archaeology students dug alongside technicians from Archeovertex Kft. and volunteers from local heritage groups, and funding came from Hungary’s National Cultural Fund and the Pilisszentiván municipality, according to the university’s account as reported by La Brújula Verde.

The reports leave several basic facts unstated. No source gives the statuette’s height, its date within the Roman period, or the exact spot in the settlement where it was found. The researchers said they expect to continue excavating in future seasons, and the Venus will be easier to interpret once the layer and building it came from are published.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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