The Pereshchepina Treasure

On 29 May 1912 two boys from the village of Mala Pereshchepyna, near Poltava in central Ukraine, were playing on a sandy hill when one of them felt something hard underfoot. Scraping away the sand, they found the wide neck of a large vessel and pulled out a gilded jar and several gold cups. The next day the local constable arrived with diggers. As they opened the hill, villagers crowded round, snatching pieces as souvenirs and tearing thin gold foil. A museum official who saw the aftermath described people trampling fragments underfoot. Searches recovered what they could, and the treasure went to the Imperial Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, where it remains.

It is the richest find of its age in eastern Europe. More than 800 objects were recovered, with over 20 kilograms of gold and around 50 kilograms of silver. There are 35 gold and silver vessels, among them a Sasanian silver dish showing the 4th-century Persian king Shapur II and a Byzantine dish inscribed for Paternus, a bishop of Tomis on the Black Sea in the early 6th century. There is a gold rhyton and the fittings of a second, a staff with a gold casing, an iron sword with gold-covered hilt and scabbard, belt sets, a torc, bracelets and rings set with amethysts, sapphires, garnets and emeralds, and square gold plaques that once covered a wooden structure. Sixty-nine Byzantine gold coins run from the emperor Maurice to Constans II.

Gold signet rings in the hoard bear Greek monograms. One has often been read as naming Kubrat, with the Byzantine rank of patrikios. Kubrat was the ruler of Old Great Bulgaria, a steppe state north of the Black Sea, in the first half of the 7th century. Byzantine writers record that he was baptised in Constantinople and honoured by the emperor Heraclius, and the Hermitage suggests the sword may have been part of a diplomatic gift from Heraclius in the 630s.

From soon after the find, many scholars have treated the site as Kubrat's grave. Fragments of oak beams, gold-woven silk and possibly bone suggested a burial. Others note that some objects seem too late for a ruler who probably died in the middle decades of the 7th century, and prefer to see the deposit as a memorial offering or treasure laid down by his successors, or attribute it to the Khazars who took over the region. In 2019 the gold-covered sword travelled outside Russia for the first time, to an exhibition in Sofia, a sign of how much the treasure means to Bulgaria.

Because it was dug out in a scramble rather than excavated, much context was lost, and it is not certain that every piece was recovered. The treasure is a key reference for the art of the steppe elites who sat between Byzantium, Persia and the nomad world, and it has given its name to the Pereshchepina culture of the region.