Potaissa is not simply an alternate name for modern Turda. It was a Roman town in Dacia, and the plateau now called Dealul Cetății preserves the remains of its legionary fortress. The town grew below and around the hill, where archaeologists have also found roads, buildings, funerary and votive monuments, coins and everyday objects. The present site is therefore a layered urban landscape: the walls on the plateau mark the military camp, while the broader archaeological zone records the civilian settlement that developed beside it.
The Roman History Museum of Turda identifies the fortress of Legio V Macedonica as the most important historical and archaeological monument of ancient Potaissa. Its rectangular enclosure measured about 573 by 408 metres, covering 23.37 hectares. The museum describes an enclosing wall around five metres high, a defensive ditch roughly 12 metres wide, four gates, internal roads and corner defenses. Those figures help visitors imagine the scale, but the surviving ground plan is incomplete; a walk among the remains is not a tour through a fully reconstructed Roman camp.
