Archaeologists and thieves vie for Thracian gold

Sofia Letter: The tale seems to change a little every time, but academics here love to tell it.

A young archaeologist on a dig in a remote part of Bulgaria stops at a roadside kiosk to buy cigarettes. The woman steps forward to serve him, and takes his breath away.

Her beauty was not remarked upon, but her necklace was of such exquisitely crafted, high-quality gold as to be far beyond the means of most rural shopkeepers.

The €1,000 that a Sofia museum paid for that Bronze Age trinket was a fraction of the international market price, but a sum that the average Bulgarian makes in half a year.

Her husband had found the necklace while tilling the sunflower fields near their home in central Bulgaria, a grassy plain dimpled by occasional low hills and tens of thousands of mogilas - the burial mounds of the ancient Thracians.

Little is known of them beyond their prowess as warriors, horsemen and goldsmiths, qualities attested to by Homer's description of them in the Iliad and the reputation of Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator who led a slave revolt against Rome.

Existing on the edge of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, from present-day Ukraine to what is now northern Turkey, the Thracians were for millennia dismissed as a barbarian rabble with no political or cultural life of their own.

But Thracian tribes did coalesce into several powerful states, most notably Dacian today's Romania and further south in Odrysia, whose capital, Seuthopolis, was close to the modern Bulgarian town of Kazanlyk.

This region, with its multitude of ancient burial mounds, has become known as the Valley of the Thracian Kings, and has yielded the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of recent years.

Thousands of delicate gold beads and rings, all almost identical, suggest the Thracians developed a way of mass-producing jewellery more than 3,000 years ago.

But that glittering horde is outshone by a discovery made close to Kazanlyk last year.

In one tomb there was a man's skeleton, dismembered according to the rites of the cult of Orpheus. And among the scattered remains lay a mask of solid, 23.5 carat gold.

Experts believe it belonged to a Thracian ruler who would drink wine from the mask and then place it over his face, in a show of power and splendour described by ancient historians.

The discovery led to many more, including a gold ring engraved with the figure of an athlete, a set of armour and bronze arrowheads, spearheads, swords and breastplates.

Nearby, after opening another tomb and finding the remains of a horse sacrificed to its master, researchers shone a light into a chamber and watched it shimmer with gold. They had discovered the probable tomb of one of the greatest Thracian kings, Seuthes III, and his 2,400-year-old treasures included a drinking cup, jewellery box, gilded battle helmet and an exquisite gold wreath.

"In the whole of Europe and the Near East there is only one find that rivals these extremely well-crafted pieces - the golden treasures found in ancient Troy," says Prof Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of the National History Museum in Sofia.

"The large number of golden objects and the expert craftsmanship in their making lead us to question Troy's supremacy as the biggest ancient centre for goldsmiths."

Ancient historians are reassessing the interplay between Greeks and Thracians, from whose mythology Hellenic culture borrowed the likes of Orpheus and Dionysus.

But this research is threatened by the rampant crime and corruption that blights Bulgaria and hampers its bid to join the European Union on January 1st, 2007.

Archaeologists are now racing looters to open Thracian burial mounds across the country, a competition in which the academics are hobbled by a lack of funds.

Of some 60,000 tombs in Bulgaria, Prof Dimitrov believes a quarter may already have been plundered, judging by items found in markets and private collections.

Many research teams have been confronted by gunmen trying to steal their finds, and digs require an armed guard to ward off overnight raids.

Georgi Kitov, whose discoveries of Thracian gold have made him a celebrity in Bulgaria, has been criticised for using heavy machinery at ancient sites, despite the risk this poses to precious artefacts.

But many say he has no choice.

"The methods he uses for excavation are a little bit unconventional," says Mark Stefanovich, an American archaeologist working in Bulgaria. "But you could spend four years just going through mound construction. You'll get information on one mound, meanwhile 200 mounds are being pilfered. You make those trade-offs." Prof Dimitrov knows the need for speed, and awaits discoveries with impatience.

"Excavations continue," he says, "and new finds literally pop out every 10 minutes."