Lovas () is a village and seat of municipality in the Vukovar-Syrmia County of eastern Croatia, located on the slopes of Fruška Gora, a few kilometers south of the main road connecting Vukovar with Ilok. Lovas has a population of 1,214 (2011), and its municipality also includes the smaller village of Opatovac (pop. 345 in 2011) which is located to the north, at the Danube. Lovas is underdeveloped municipality which is statistically classified as the First Category Area of Special State Concern by the Government of Croatia. History Early history The first officially identified archaeological site at Lovas was located on the western edge of the village, at Kalvarija. Its position was documented in 1895 on the basis of stray finds that were sent to the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb. The finds continued arriving to the museum until 1900 and they were most often sent by the local priest to Josip Brunšmid, the director of the museum. It came as no surprise that Brunšmid was the first to publish a portion of the finds from Lovas in 1902, among which a copper dagger. In 1939 a Middle Bronze Age hoard was discovered in Lovas and handed to the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, where it is still kept and displayed in the permanent exhibition of the prehistoric collection. In 1970 and 1972 small-scale field surveys were conducted with the goal of identifying the archaeological sites in the area. In this period the three best-known sites were identified at Kalvarija, Orlinac and Staro groblje (“Old Cemetery”). Surveys confirmed the inhabitance of these locations from the Neolithic until the Medieval period. In 1975 the construction work in the village uncovered the remains of inhabitance in the Neolithic, Copper Age (Baden Culture) and Early Iron Age in Vladimir Nazor street. The same construction work revealed an Early Iron Age necropolis in Ante Starčević street. Another village in Lovas Municipality, Opatovac, is almost equally rich in archaeological finds. The first finds, dating exclusively to the Copper Age, were reported already in 1911 in the former vineyard of Friedrich Königsdorf. In 1962 an Early Iron Age settlement and necropolis were reported at Fruškogorska street number 6. One of the latest confirmed findings was that of the Vučedol Culture pottery in 2002, somewhere near the bank of the river Danube. The Lovas Hoard The Lovas Hoard was discovered in October 1939. It was ploughed out from the