The archaeological season of 2009 carried out in the ancient city of Hadrianopolis, focused once again in the excavation of the Roman thermal complex, located to the north of the theatre. The data revealed show that during Late Antiquity, a large building was erected above the structures of the 2nd – 3rd Centuries AD. With the demolition of the earlier annexes, the building had a new façade facing toward west, next to an open area.
The excavation revealed a series of rooms, set around a larger rectangular area (8, 45 × 7, 50 m), from which traces of the limestone slabs of the floor were preserved.
The access to the rectangular area was enabled through a threshold at the northeastern corner. Of a significant importance among the material revealed in the floor layers of the public building are some exemplary pots, distinguished by their raised neck and decorated with horizontal circular lines. In the same layers, cooking pots (the olle) with rounded rims and globular body were uncovered. These vessels find similarities with other types of “corrugated cooking pot” which were produced in the Eastern Aegean, and spread in the entire Adriatic region during the 2nd – 5th Centuries AD. The relationship with the Aegean world is also proven by the discovery of a glazed kettle fragment of a gray color with a trefoil rim (diameter 6 cm). The excavation data show that after the middle of the 4th Century AD, the inner and outer (at western side) spaces of the complex were reorganized: the construction of two wall lines, divided the central area into three parts, which were perhaps connected by an obligatory curved passageway, whereas the room next to the northern entrance into two areas; the floor levels were also raised. The hot rooms of the Roman thermae, consisting of a rectangular tepidarium with an apsidal pool, and a caldarium to the west, were also rearranged. The thick destruction layers, which cover the earlier structures, or the later rearrangement of the Roman bath, date between the end of the 4th and the beginning of the 5th Century AD. The construction of a rounded room with a central hearth, probably a laconium, which replaces the thermae, is part of a series of modifications at the public complex. These later arrangements create poorer and weaker building structures.
After the destruction of the floor level in the western side of the hot rooms of the thermae, a new wall was constructed which divided the tepidarium in two rooms. The earlier pool of the rooms was still retained, though connected now to a new water system of circulation.
By the middle of the 6th Century AD, a new structure relating to productive activity was built on the abandonment levels uncovered in the area of the Roman thermae.