The Roman-Germanic Museum in Cologne houses the mighty, 14.7-meter-tall tomb of Publicius, one of the most important Roman monuments north of the Alps. According to a Cologne legend, several young men happened upon it while building a party room in the basement of their parents' house.
Josef Gens tells the true story behind the legend, which reads like an archeological thriller. Their discovery of the first Roman ashlar under the house was purely coincidental. When the Gens family informed the city of Cologne of their find, it immediately imposed an excavation ban. When nothing happened for six months, the Gens brothers and their friends decided to take the excavation into their own hands.
From 1965 to 1967, dedicating over 13,000 hours of their free time to the endeavor, the Gens brothers and their friends salvaged 70 ashlars – some weighing a ton – from the tomb from beneath their parents’ home. Nine meters beneath their parents’ house, they erected a structurally secure pit with several excavation tunnels. Under adventurous conditions yet proceeding in a highly professional manner all the same, they recovered 70 Roman ashlars, which they displayed in 1967 for over 15,000 visitors as part of a private exhibition.
It is thanks to the excavators’ local patriotism that the tomb is on display in Cologne, for they received an offer of a million Deutsche Marks from the United States for the Publicius statue alone. The excavators agreed to give the complete archeological findings to the city of Cologne for half this amount.
