'The Thracian Hero'

[Flavia Gemina]

When I was in Bulgaria (ancient Thrace) last week, I saw tons of tombstones with the motif which the museum labels call the 'Thracian Hero'. Usually he is on horseback aiming a spear at the boar -- with or without his faithful hound beneath the horse -- and there is a snake coiled around the tree. But this guy is aiming a coiling snake at the boar. What's that all about? Anybody?

 

 

Edited October 2, 2007 by Flavia Gemina

[Kosmo]

The images of the Thracian/Danubian Hero/Knight/Rider are plentiful, but alas we know little about his myth. Actually less then little.

Some say that his image was later used for the depiction of St. George, but the stories about St. George are placed in Anatolia and he is beleived to be of Cappadoccian origins. It seems that the image of the Thracian Hero it's the only part of him that survived in St. George.

[Nephele]

As Kosmo mentioned (and you observed, yourself, FG), the images of the Thracian Hero are plentiful. Perhaps Nora Dimitrova, in her article titled "Inscriptions and Iconography in the Monuments of the Thracian Rider" for the journal Hesperia (April-June, 2002 issue, published by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens) can shed some light on the reason why you found this fellow wielding a snake instead of the customary spear.

 

Dimitrova doesn't specifically describe a Thracian rider wielding a snake, among the reliefs she mentions, but I think she perhaps gives a clue as to why such an odd relief might turn up. Dimitrova attributes this to the mass production of these reliefs, and "the Thracian practice of using a standard image for different divinities."

 

She points out, as an example, reliefs from the area which depict Asklepios holding a serpent-staff, and Hygieia holding a snake, and how duplicates of these reliefs were dedicated to Silvanus and Diana (worshipped by the Romanized population in the region), suggesting that "the original iconography was not overly important to the dedicants: they used an already-made relief showing Asklepios and Hygieia, but invested it with new meaning, thereby satisfying their need for a dedication to Silvanus and Diana. What mattered was only the basic formal resemblance, consisting in the depiction of a male and female deity. A similar phenomenon occurred centuries later, when Thracian rider reliefs were used by Christians in the cults of St. Demetrius and especially St. George."

 

Just a guess, but perhaps the relief you saw might have been one of these originally "mass produced" reliefs of the Thracian rider, and then it was altered slightly to represent some other god associated with serpents (such as Asklepios), by a devotee more creative than those who merely substituted unaltered images to represent other gods?

 

-- Nephele

[Flavia Gemina]

Thanks, Nephele.

 

It also occurred to me that as the snake represents immortality (it sheds its skin and is constantly 'reborn') it might be a metaphor for life conquering death. These are mainly 3rd and 4th century tombs and might even be Christian!

 

Vale.