Kamenica and Varadin

...] As to Varadin, its earliest founder was a Peter the Hermit who lived in seclusion in the surrounding hillsides. The word has it that he was of a wealthy family background, and, having inherited from his deceased parents an extremely great wealth, yet bereaved, he did not know what to do with all of that since he had already chosen reclusive life till his own death; in a dream, he was advised by a long-bearded gray-haired old man to put the large property to charity. Peter asked him: What kind of it?
 And he told him to convert his cave-hermitage into a fort. As a pious man, Peter protested, for the advice was not aimed at any benefit to religion and Christianity, and he thought that it would be better if he built churches and monasteries, so at first he was not willing to accept it. However, the old man kept putting pressure on him through dreams and, when he finally told Peter that – if he erected the fort, countless masses of infidels and Christiandom's sanguineous enemies were to be crushed at its caves and walls – Peter began to believe in the prophecy and started to build the fort. While he did so, the old man taught him through dreams how to build.  When the fortress was completed, the old man visited him in his dream again and told him the name of the fort: as it had come from his property and his name, it should be named 'Peter's var or fortress'; and so it has remained so till the present day.
Whether some truth did lie in the folk tale or not, we must take it for certain that even before Peter there had existed a Roman little fort in the extant Varadin (old Cusum); what testifies of that is the very position of the place and the ancient remains. During the Roman age it was garrisoned with Dalmatian cavalry under the command of the Duke of Savian Pannonia. In 1203, a Cistercian abbey stood therein, and – as witnessed by Timon, the Hungarian King Wladyslaw stayed there for a while in 1494. [...]

Ilija Okrugić Sriemac