Road station
Ad Radices
Popina Leka
Ad Radices, at the roots, stood at the northern foot of the Haemus, at Popina Leka near today's Beli Osam, on a plateau above the young Osam river, guarding an old bridge over the Knezha on the road from Philippopolis to Oescus. People lived here before the Romans, and coins run from the 1st century to the middle of the 3rd. Then, in the 4th century, the settlement moved up onto a nearby hill that nature made easy to defend, so that its name, at the foot of the mountain, no longer fitted. A late Roman tower close by may have kept the station's name.