Cremation Cemetery Under the Carolingian Wooden Church in Lobor

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Cremation Cemetery Under the Carolingian Wooden Church in Lobor, Page 1 of 1

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In Lobor (northwestern Croatia), on the south side of the existing church dedicated to Our Lady of the Mountain, at the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries, a cremation cemetery was established in the most attractive place of the former late antique hilltop fortress. This cemetery belonged to a community that participated in the significant political changes that took place in late Avar and Carolingian Pannonia at the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries. Although human remains were found in only one urn, several contemporaneous finds in the pits of the wooden church pillars and under the floor of the wooden church show that there were more such urns, but that all of them were destroyed or damaged during the construction of the church. Cremation graves precede inhumation graves, beginning in the mid-9th century and they are important evidence of a change in the burial ritual of the community in which one of the most important missionary points among the Slavs between the Drava and Sava rivers was established.