Tomb raiders strip Bulgaria of its treasures

[ASCLEPIADES]

Salve!

 

By Malcolm Moore in Sofia Last Updated: 2:54am BST 31/08/2007

 

Among the paperclips in the bottom drawer of a desk in Bulgaria's National History Museum is a small cardboard box packed with 5,000-year-old gold rings.

"A farmer's wife was wearing them as a necklace. Her husband had just dug them up in a field nearby. As you can imagine, we were stunned."

Each tiny gold ring is 23-carat gold, but nobody knows how they were crafted.

"Modern jewellers cannot make these things without a magnifying glass," said Miss Tsaneva-Dimitrova, adding that similar rings were discovered at Troy.

Found at the same time was a small 20-carat gold dagger from 3,000BC that is "still so sharp you can shave with it."

Priceless antiques are strewn all over the chaotic laboratory, as restorers are hard at work on a pair of bronze greaves, or leg armour, engraved with the image of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom.

Bulgaria, which was once part of Ancient Thrace, ranks behind only Italy and Greece in Europe in terms of the numbers of antiquities lying in its soil.

The Thracians, who included Spartacus and Orpheus, had a highly advanced civilisation and fought with Alexander the Great on his expedition to Asia. Later, the country was ruled by the Romans, Persians, Byzantines and Turks, all of whom left a rich array of treasure behind.

However, since the collapse of the Soviet empire, little attention has been paid to Bulgaria's cultural heritage.

 

Sequitur