The field season of 2009 in the ancient city of Hadrianopolis centered in the previously excavated habitation area. The excavation showed a monumentalization of the city during the reign of the Roman Emperor Hadrian; however the earliest archaeological layers indicate that the settlement was inhabited since the Hellenistic Period. These earlier levels, which were identified under the ruins of the Roman thermae, consist of black gloss pottery fragments of the 4th Century BC., and suggest the occupation of the site from the 3-2nd Centuries BC. The excavation uncovered two wall lines set at perpendicular angels to each other (US 2077 and 2099), which seem to indicate for the presence of a large building (established to the west and east of US 2077) built during the 2nd Century AD. The previously discovered floor layers built of limestone slabs of 0, 7 cm thick, and perhaps a thermal structure, from which only a channel is identified, seem to relate to this large building. This suggests that as early as the Hadrian period, the Hellenistic and Roman village near Sofratike was developing into the urban settlement of Hadrianopolis. The identification of a channel supported by arcades at the limits of the settlement, suggest that perhaps at this time, an aqueduct carried water into the city from the hills of the village of Terihat.
A series of walls belonging to a large building complex of a public character, and probably of a thermal function were identified above the early Roman structures. It is likely that the building complex was constructed in the 3rd Century AD.
The quantity of material revealed in the upper layers of excavations, including a plate-lead fragment of type “Ostia I”, suggest for the habitation of the settlement during the 4-5th Centuries AD.
Between the end of the 4th and beginning of the 5th Centuries AD, a crisis seems to have affected the city. This moment is documented by the thick layers of collapse which cover the earlier phases, or the alternation of these latter with poorer and vulnerable structures.
The 6th Century AD is represented by traces of a three nave building built upon an earlier structure; in the ancient sources of the time (Procopius of Caesarea – De Aedeficis IV 1, 36) the Roman city of Hadrianopolis is mentioned as Ioustinianoupolis.
The occupation of the city continued even after the 6th Century AD., though now it appears weaker then in the earlier imperial phases. Layers of abandonment were identified in the area previously occupied by the thermae, where by the mid of the 6th Century a new structure was built. The rooms of this new structure are of a rectangular shape, and one of them (the ex- tepidarium area) was probably used as a metal workshop. This moment (by the second half of the 6th Century), signs the beginning of an accelerated and progressive abandonment phase of the settlement. Afterward, new but poorer structures were built in the habitation area; some had apses incorporated, stone foundations and zoccolature and wall lines of reused materials.