Vagalinski told the Bulgarian news site Standart that the man “probably suffocated in the fire.”

This is the current working hypothesis.

It is not confirmed.

The skeleton has been moved for anthropological study, and researchers are still gathering evidence.

The identity of the attacker or attackers, the specific event, and the exact cause of death all remain to be determined — and some may never be determined with certainty.

But the evidence already in hand tells a story.

And the story it tells is of a final, desperate decision made in a burning building during one of the most violent centuries in the history of the Late Roman world.

This is what we know, and this is what we don’t know.

What They Were Digging For

The excavation at Deultum in the summer of 2026 was not a search for dramatic discoveries.

It was the kind of methodical, systematic archaeological work that proceeds season after season at important Roman sites, slowly assembling a picture of how a city looked, how it functioned, and how it ended.

Vagalinski’s team from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences had been investigating the area of Deultum’s western gate complex.

The western gate was one of the main entrances to the city, and the towers and turrets associated with it would have been critical defensive structures in the period when Deultum faced the greatest military threats.

The northern turret of the western gate — the specific structure where the discovery was made — was a small defensive tower.