Bulgaria's Golden Age

[Gil]

There was nothing unusual about the village shop in the depths of the countryside, 75 miles east of Sofia. What astonished the young archaeologists wanting cigarettes was the shopkeeper’s jewellery. Her necklace and earrings were exquisite: the beads so small and perfectly worked that her customers assumed they were modern, the gold of a high carat. But how could a shopkeeper afford such trinkets in a country where the average monthly salary is £100?

The archaeologists didn’t know it but the shopkeeper’s jewellery was 5,000 years old, dating from the Bronze Age. Her farmer husband had found the loose beads while tilling the sunflower fields. He showed the archaeologists where and, last spring, they excavated a series of burial mounds, uncovering an ancient cache of 15,000 tiny gold beads, each barely a millimetre across.


The most sensational archaeological finds of recent times are currently being made in one of the poorest countries in Europe: Bulgaria. Bulgaria has long argued that Thracian art is both indigenous and distinct, yet compared with classical Greece and Rome, Thrace has largely been overlooked. The discovery promises to revolutionise our understanding of the ancient goldsmiths. We now know their work was minutely detailed; they could manipulate gold in miniature - spheres, cylinders, whorls and octahedrons like double-headed pyramids.


By the first millennium BC the Thracian tribes - a loose confederation of peoples about a million strong - had spread across Europe. Great warriors and slave-traders, by the 5th-century BC they had become master goldsmiths. The ore was abundant - it still is - and was tooled for the Thracian aristocracy and exported to Troy, Athens and Rome. Little wonder that the Romans referred to Golden Thrace.


Bulgarian museums have now mounted their own excavations after widespread looting of Thracian tombs. The director of the National History Museum in Sofia, Bozhidar Dimitrov, admits that controls have been lax since communism collapsed in 1989. “Banditry has flourished. Many people have illegally dug and extracted treasures and... destroyed historical monuments. We museum people became convinced that a drowning man’s salvation rests in his own hands.” Reluctant to estimate how much of Bulgaria’s cultural heritage has been lost, he fears the mafia has found more gold than the museums.


I drove out to the Valley of the Thracian Kings, three hours from Sofia, to see the gold-rush for myself. Villages are almost deserted and the traffic is mostly horse- and donkey-drawn. The Thracian tumuli - molehills the size of a two-storey house - are scattered across a grassy plain, unmissable and obviously manmade.


Archaeologist Georgi Kitov leads me through a dark, narrow passage 30 yards long into a tomb where in October 2004 he experienced “the longest, most thrilling, most beautiful night” of his life. In the first chamber the team found the skeleton of a horse, sacrificed to its master. Kitov shone his torch into the burial chamber beyond; the floor shimmered in a hundred places. Was it gold? An exultant Kitov soon had the proof in his hands - a breathtaking gold wreath, 2,500 years old. It was once worn by a Thracian King, Seuthes III, identified by the name in Greek on his gilded, bronze battle helmet, also found in the tomb.


Kitov tells his story with bravado, but in a quiet aside, one of his assistants mutters that it was a night of terror. No sooner had they got into the first chamber and established the tomb’s importance, than masked men surrounded the archaeologists pointing automatic weapons. The group was held overnight at the local police station. What exactly happened? In Bulgaria, the more questions asked, the murkier it gets. In September, the Bulgarian government was told it must fight corruption if it is to join the EU. Bulgarian archaeologists and journalists told me privately that soldiers, policemen and custom officers are somehow involved in the looting.


But King Seuthes’ gold and silver treasures - wreath, drinking cup, jewellery box and helmet - were saved for the state and now reside in the regional museum in Kazanlak. At the National History Museum in Sofia another newly discovered gold wreath has its own cabinet in the Thracian Gallery. More elaborate than King Seuthes’ but the same age, a model of Nike, Greek goddess of victory, is entwined in its leaves and a chain of pressed medallions hangs from it. In the basement the head conservator, Svetla Tsaneva, is bent over a microscope, cleaning and reconstructing necklaces from tiny gold beads found after the shopkeeper’s jewellery was admired. Tsaneva is astounded by their uniform beauty. “There are no defects, no sign of soldering,” she says. “You have the impression they were punched or minted like coins. They must have developed a tool to mass-produce them 5,000 years ago.”


Similar beads were found by Heinrich Schliemann, a German amateur archaeologist, at the site of Troy in Turkey in 1873. But the craftsmanship of the Bulgarian hoard is far more sophisticated. Tsaneva can barely contain her excitement. “All my knowledge of the ancient goldsmiths has been completely turned upside down.” She is certain Schliemann’s gold came from “our lands”. Museums in Japan, France and Switzerland have asked to borrow the new finds. Bulgaria will probably welcome the additional funds - the loan fees will be useful in the ongoing war with looters.