Under the Haberdashery By the City Gate

Under the Haberdashery By the City Gate

What was going on at the Gens haberdashery shop? Every weekend for two years the Gens sons, Heinz, 26, and Josef, 23, carried construction materials into their shop near St. Severin's Gate in Cologne, Germany. Aided by friends, they carried out large quantities of earth. From the building came the sound of an internal-combustion engine. Exhaust vapor escaped through a pipe in the roof. Neighbors deduced that they were building a secret racing car; the Gens boys insisted that they were merely enlarging their basement. They were indeed digging--straight down. In the process, they were uncovering one of the most important Roman relics ever found in Germany: the funeral monument of Lucius Poblicius, a 1st century veteran of the Roman legions and citizen of Cologne.

Perfect Satyr. Erected between 50 and 69 A.D., the monument was discovered by the Gens brothers in 1965 beneath the shop basement. Exposing a large limestone block, they dug around it and discovered the perfectly preserved figure of a satyr chiseled in bas-relief on one side. Beneath the first block, they found a second, also carved. They called officials of Cologne's Roman-Germanic museum, who immediately bought the stones for $2,000 but explained that archaeological teams could not be spared at the moment to in vestigate the site. In the meantime, the museum officials, who have authority over Roman archaeological sites in Cologne, ordered the digging stopped.

After waiting three months, the Gens brothers decided to go it alone-- but responsibly. First, they studied detailed exhibits of mining techniques displayed at Munich's German Museum. Back in Cologne, they bought mortar and scrounged bricks from construction sites, then placed a sand-covered ceiling over the old entrance of their excavation -- to make it appear that they had filled it in. Entering the excavation through a secret door they built through the back of a cupboard, they dug farther, shoring up their excavations with brick columns and meticulously uncovering stone after stone--some of them weighing 3 tons--from the monument.

The team of amateur diggers sifted through every bucket of excavated earth, collecting more than 40 cartons of potsherds. As each block was recovered, its precise location was noted on a chart so that archaeologists could later determine exactly where the monument stood and how it fell. Eventually, the young archaeologists found and excavated 58 large blocks, which they then correctly reassembled into a section of the ancient monument on an undisturbed area of the basement floor.

Proud of their accomplishment, they recently threw secrecy to the wind, opened their basement display room to visitors. Among them was Professor Otto Doppelfeld of the Roman-Germanic museum, who forgave the youths for disobeying orders. "Indeed, I'm quite pleased the young people made the dig themselves," he says. "We would have excavated, of course, but just the planning would have taken years."

Eventually, the city of Cologne hopes to recover the remaining stones and reerect the entire monument--estimated to have stood 60 ft. high and 12 ft. wide--somewhere near St. Severin's Gate. For their part, the Gens brothers and their friends will lose their strictly amateur archaeologist status. As the purchase price for the blocks and other artifacts, museum officials plan to offer them between $75,000 and $125,000.

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