The Pietroasele Treasure

In the spring of 1837 two villagers cutting stone on Istrița hill, near Pietroasele in the foothills north-east of Bucharest, found a mass of gold vessels and jewellery stuck together. One of them later compared the arrangement to a hen sheltering her chicks, and Romanians still call the hoard Cloșca cu puii de aur, the hen with the golden chicks. Accounts speak of 22 objects weighing around 20 kilograms. Soon afterwards about ten of them had vanished, sold or broken up for their metal, and only twelve reached the authorities.

Those twelve are among the finest pieces of late antique goldwork to survive anywhere. The tableware is Roman in manner: a broad patera with a seated female figure modelled in the round at its centre and a crowd of deities in relief around her; a large plain tray; a ewer; and two polygonal cups with walls of openwork gold, once filled with coloured stones, and handles in the shape of animals. The jewellery is something else entirely. Four eagle-headed brooches, one of them enormous, are encrusted with garnets and other stones in the polychrome style that the Goths and their neighbours carried across Europe in the 4th and 5th centuries.

One of the neck-rings carries a short inscription in runes, usually read as naming the Goths and as a dedication of something holy. It is one of very few runic texts from the Gothic world, and it suffered for its fame. Soon after the find it was cut into pieces by a goldsmith, and one rune was damaged; drawings, a cast and an early photograph allow scholars to reconstruct it.

The treasure's later history is almost as dramatic as its burial. In November 1875 a young seminarian broke into the Bucharest antiquities museum through the ceiling and carried off the gold; he was caught within days, but several pieces had been flattened or broken and needed restoration. In 1884 the collection was rescued from a fire by being thrown out of a window. In December 1916, with German armies approaching Bucharest, the Romanian state treasury was evacuated to Moscow for safekeeping, and the hoard went with it. It did not come back until 1956.

Who buried it, and why, are open questions. The 19th-century scholar Alexandru Odobescu attributed the hoard to Athanaric, leader of the Thervingian Goths, who died in 381, and the idea still circulates. Modern archaeologists are more cautious. The mixture of Roman plate and Germanic jewellery fits the cosmopolitan elite of the Chernyakhov culture north of the Danube, and the hoard may equally belong to the early 5th century, when the region was under Hunnic domination. Analysis of the metal suggests the gold came from several different sources. The hoard was probably the treasury, or part of the cult equipment, of a Gothic ruling family, hidden at a moment of danger and never retrieved.