site.btaLetnitsa Treasure Appliques Part of Ancient Thrace Getty Museum Exhibition

Appliques from the Letnitsa Treasure will be part of the exhibits of fourteen museums from Bulgaria that are participating in an upcoming exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California. The Ancient Thrace and the Classical World: Treasures from Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece exhibition features more than 150 artefacts. It will be on between November 3 and March 3, 2025.

The Letnitsa Treasure includes of appliques to horse ammunition attached to the halter straps, reins, breast strap, saddle and mane of the horse, as well as an iron bridle. In addition to these, the hoard also contains smaller items - silver gilt eight-leaf rosettes, acorns, a large number of silver tubes, and beads, the Chief Curator of Archaeology Department at Lovech Regional Museum of History, Radoslav Gushterakliev, told BTA.

The Letnitsa appliques are part of the national, European and world cultural heritage. They have been displayed in major museums in various cities and countries on several continents (Europe, Asia and America), he added.

Lovech Regional Museum participates in the exhibition with three items from the treasure – a goddess with a three-headed dragon (snake), a hierogamy scene and an applique of lion and griffin.

The Letnitsa Treasure is one of the richest in terms of text narrated through figurative language in Thracian toreutics, Gushterakliev told BTA, adding that the appliques have continued to excite historians, scholars, epigraphers, and archaeologists ever since their discovery.

The treasure was found by chance in the vicinity of what was then a village in 1963. Workers digging for the foundations of a new building chanced upon a bronze vessel with the mouth down at a depth of 50-60 cm. The workers decided to share the valuable contents, but archaeologist Pavel Pavlov from the museum in nearby Lovech gathered the objects with the help of the local authorities.

Twenty-three of the appliques made of silver with gilding by two masters in the period of the flowering of Thracian culture and art between 385-335 BC are of great scientific value. They feature images of horsemen wearing plated armour and trousers, wrestling animals, and hierogamy (sacred marriage), the Chief Curator said.

The background appliques, for the horse's breast collar, were made by a Thracian craftsman, in the characteristic artistic style of the period for Northern Thrace, during the reign of the Thracian Odrysian ruler Cotys I (383-359 BC). This is one of several hypotheses for their application, including shield or dress decoration.

The appliqués from the treasure were probably buried in the ground in 335 BC during the campaign of Alexander III in the Thracian lands. The bronze cauldron in which they were placed served as a kind of vault, is one assumption.

The appliqués placed in the ground are a ritual gift to the Great Mother Goddess (the earth). The treasure itself is a symbolic sacrifice. It belongs to the so-called buried treasures in the earth, as a royal gift to the Great Mother Goddess. The act of laying them in the ground is tantamount to uniting the king with the goddess in a sacred marriage/hierogamy.

Besides the one depicting a hierogamy, the other two appliques to be presented in the Getty Museum confirm the early emergence of the cult of the Great Mother Goddess, the iconography of the Thracian Horseman and female deities in Thracian religion and art.

The second one depicts a maiden and a three-headed dragon which, legend had it, demanded such a tribute every year to let waters flow freely. After the Thracian hero vanquished the dragon he won the right to marry the relevant maiden princess and thus become co-ruler of the king, Gushterakliev explained.

The third, made in the mid-4th century BC, depicts a lion fighting a griffin.

Since 1974 the appliqués from Letnitsa have rarely been returned to Lovech. They have participated in dozens of exhibitions dedicated to the Thracians and ancient Thrace. This is their latest participation in an exhibition in the USA, Radoslav Gushterakliev said.

Lovech Regional History Museum 

The idea of establishing a museum in Lovech was born right after the Liberation from Ottoman domination and it was actually founded in 1895, at first on the second floor of the local community centre.

By 1899 the museum had 1,254 exhibits: coins, Bulgarian costumes, documents and stone objects, mainly donated.

Since 1902 the museum at the Nauka Community Centre was named after the Hungarian scientist Felix Kanitz.

Work was severely hampered in the difficult years of the wars of national unification. During the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) the museum was closed.

After the First World War, activity was resumed with the active work of the history teachers Geno Vassilev and Mihail Hadzhinedelchev. It was they who started the first archaeological excavations of the Lovech fortress in 1921.

Over the years, the museum collection expanded gradually, with separate sections dedicated to pre-history, the classical era, coins, icons, the Middle Ages and the revolutionary years, as well as ethnography and art.

Between 1934 and 1944 the Museum received large donations from Geno Ivanov, Prof. Dr. Paraskev Stoyanov, Atanas Antipov and Mikhail Hadjinedelchev.

Today, the Lovech Museum of History has seven departments, including archaeology, conservation and restoration, Bulgarian history 15th – 19th century, ethnography and modern history. As a result of the collecting work of several generations of museum workers, more than 70,000 movable cultural objects are stored in the museum's repository.