ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPLORATIONS IN DUROSTORUM – DRASTAR – SILISTRA (Rumyana Koleva – rukoleva@gmail.com, Chavdar Kirilov) Significant part of the site was destroyed during excavation works for construction a new building. At least three monumental buildings belonged to the Ottoman period. Coins and pottery of the 13th – 14th centuries were found. Twenty-three Christian graves were explored, some of them containing coins, the latest ones Latin imitations minted in Constantinople during the first half of the 13th century and coins minted by the Bulgarian Despot Yakov Svetoslav (c. 1258 – 1275). The graves belong to a necropolis of the 12th – 14th centuries situated at the southern fortification wall of Drastar, which was explored in 1986. At least four buildings dated from the end of the 11th to mid 13th centuries were discovered. Their walls are bonded with mud and the floors are of trampled clay. The buildings were constructed over pits and remains of houses of the 11th century. Anonymous Byzantine coins of the last decades of the 11th century were found on the floor levels of the buildings and below them. Materials and structures of the 10th – 11th centuries were discovered, including at least four sunken-floored houses partly dug into the ground and more than 100 pits. A corner of building with walls up to 1.50 m in width was explored. The walls were constructed of ashlars, 1 m by 50 cm in size. The building was dismantled during the Middle Ages. Its foundations were dug into a stratum containing Late Antique pottery, a bronze coin of the 3rd century AD and a coin minted by Emperor Maximian Herculius. The building could be dated between the Late Antiquity and the end of the 10th century AD and probably it was a proto-Bulgarian pagan shrine demolished at the end of the 9th century AD after the Baptism of the Bulgars. An Early Byzantine stratum with fragmentary building ceramics and sherds was explored. A sunken-floored house partly dug into the ground with pottery of the second half of the 6th century AD and a pottery kiln with two chambers of the 6th century AD were discovered.