Adamclisi is the site of the Tropaeum Traiani. Of the original monument, built by the Roman Emperor in 109 A.D. to celebrate his victory over the Dacians and the Sarmatians, there remains only the cylindrical base. The present building, a reconstruction of the ancient model, was erected in 1977. Trajan put up his to commemorate his triumph over Decebalus, King of the Dacians, whom the Rumanian nation numbers among its heroes and the great men of its history, and the descendants of Decebalus have rebuilt it as an act of homage to the glory of both of them, the victor and the vanquished.
Decebalus is a historic character and at the same time a symbolic figure, a political strategist of genius who over the centuries has become the hero of poems and folksongs, the emblem of the freedom of Rumania. But the Rumanians, who honour him as the champion of their oppressed identity, consider themselves in equal measure sons of his and of his enemy, of the invaded Dacians and of the Latin invaders. The Dacio-Roman synthesis and the continuity of this synthesis over the centuries is, in Rumania, the foundation of the idea and feeling of nationhood. In his Illustrated History of the Rumanian People, Dinu Giurescu mentions a stone erected near the Tropaeum Traiani by the sons of a certain Daizus, who fell in battle against the Kostoboks. From the stone we learn that Daizus, like his father Comozus, had a Dacian name, but that his sons already had Latin names, Iustus and Valens. The historian is pleased to note this process of Romanization within the space of three generations, and it is pleasing also to Rumanian patriotism, proud of the nation’s Latinity – proud of being a wedge in the Slavic sea, a fact deprecated by the Czarist minister Gorchakov but a cause of satisfaction to Cavour.