The Kaper Koraon Treasure

Between about 1908 and 1910 lots of early Byzantine silver began to emerge from the villages of northern Syria, in the hills between Aleppo and the coast. Ottoman officials seized one group, from a field at Stuma near Idlib, and sent it to the imperial museum in Istanbul in February 1908. Others passed quietly through dealers in Aleppo and Hama, through a bank manager who took them to Port Said, and on to Paris and the great American collectors. Each group came with its own find story, some of them contradictory, and they were sold under different names: the Hama, Riha, Antioch and Stuma treasures.

In the 1980s the Byzantinist Marlia Mundell Mango argued that these lots belonged together. Several pieces from the Hama group carry the same dedication, to Saint Sergius of the village of Kaper Koraon, the ancient name of Kurin, a village near Idlib. Donor inscriptions recur across groups, and the patens and fans of Stuma and Riha are clearly pairs, made in the same workshop with the same imperial control stamps. Her reconstruction, about 56 objects in all, became known as the Kaper Koraon Treasure and was presented in an exhibition at the Walters Art Gallery in 1986. Not everyone accepts that every piece belongs.

Read as one, the treasure is the church plate of a prosperous village over three generations. There are chalices and patens for the Eucharist, crosses for procession or the altar, lamps and tall lampstands, ewers, fans that deacons waved over the altar, spoons, strainers and decorative plaques. Most were gifts. One lampstand records that the sons of a man named Maximinus, Sergius, Symeon, Daniel and Thomas, gave it with their prayers; a chalice was the prayer of Pelagius and Basianus. The Walters suggests that donors gave pieces from their own dinner services in fulfilment of vows.

The quality varies. The Stuma and Riha patens, with gilded scenes of Christ giving communion to the apostles, are imperial-standard work stamped in the 570s. Other pieces are thinner village commissions, and analysis has shown copper and other metals alloyed with the silver. Dates on control stamps run from 542 to the 570s, and some objects are thought to be early 7th century.

When and why the silver went into the ground is uncertain. Northern Syria passed to Persian occupation in the early 7th century and then to the Arab conquest, and some scholars link the burial to those upheavals. The Walters Art Museum prefers the 8th century, when parts of Syria were gradually abandoned by Byzantine Christians.

The most famous object associated with the treasure is the Antioch Chalice in the Metropolitan Museum, a silver cup in an openwork gilded shell of vines enclosing Christ and the apostles. When it surfaced it was hailed by some as the Holy Grail. The Met dates it to 500-550 and suggests it may have been a standing lamp rather than a cup.