The Panagyurishte Treasure

On 8 December 1949 three brothers were digging clay for a tile works beside the railway station at Panagyurishte, in the hills of central Bulgaria, when their spades struck metal. What came out of the ground was a set of nine gold vessels weighing a little over six kilograms, the richest single find of ancient gold made in Europe in the years after the Second World War. A curator from the local museum recognised at once that the pieces were Thracian, and the set was handed to the state.

The nine pieces belong together as a drinking service. The phiale is a broad, shallow bowl for pouring libations; its surface is covered in concentric rings of tiny embossed heads and acorns around a central boss. The largest piece is an amphora-rhyton, a two-handled jar whose handles take the form of centaurs and which has small spouts low on the body so that wine could be poured out in a stream. The other seven are rhyta and jugs: three shaped as the heads of women, wearing elaborate headdresses, and four ending in the heads or foreparts of animals, including goats and deer.

Almost every surface carries figures drawn from Greek myth and ritual. Scholars have identified Heracles, Theseus, Dionysos and a number of goddesses, while the frieze around the amphora shows armed men converging on a door, read by some as a scene from the story of the Seven against Thebes. The craftsmanship is Greek in its figure style but the shapes, especially the animal-headed rhyta, belong to a tradition shared by Thracian and Persian courts. That mix is typical of the Odrysian kingdom, which controlled much of Thrace in the 5th and 4th centuries BC and absorbed influences from both its neighbours.

The phiale carries an inscription giving its weight in two systems, Greek drachmas and Persian darics. It is a small detail with a large implication: precious vessels in this world were also stores of value, weighed and counted like coin, and a ruler's table service doubled as part of his treasury.

Nobody knows who buried the set or why. The pieces are dated to around 300 BC, and the usual suggestion is that they were hidden during a period of upheaval, such as the Macedonian campaigns or the Celtic incursions into Thrace in the early 3rd century BC. Some writers have linked the service to the Odrysian king Seuthes III; this is an attractive idea but cannot be proved, since the vessels were found by chance and without any recorded archaeological context.

Today the treasure is one of Bulgaria's national emblems. It has been lent to exhibitions across Europe, North America and Japan, and its custody has itself been a matter of debate between the national museum in Sofia, the archaeological museum in Plovdiv and the town of Panagyurishte, which asks to show its treasure at home for part of each year.