Station: [8] Funerary monuments

All the funerary monuments you see on display here come from Passau and the surrounding area. The one decorated with dolphins was part of a larger burial monument. In 1981, it was retrieved from the riverbed of the Inn, together with the tombstone of Publius Tenatius Essimnus, a wine-trader, which is displayed on the upper floor of the museum. Two other stones were found at Rotthof, a village located around 20 kilometres south of Passau, where there was a country estate that supplied Boiodurum with goods. The upper parts of both monuments are built into the outer face of the southern wall of the Siebenschläfer, or Seven Sleepers church in Rotthof. They depict three and four deceased figures respectively. The total number gave rise to the belief that they depicted seven Christian martyrs who were persecuted and sealed in a cave near Ephesos around the year 250 AD. Don’t you agree that the people depicted here appear to be looking out of a window? The German archaeological term for this style is “Fenstergucker-relief”, or “window gawker-relief”. The original monument found in the Innstadt district also bore this kind of relief. Inscriptions would have been engraved into a lower section of the monument.