Bulgarian Gangsters Busted for Looting 4,600 Ancient Artifacts from Historical sites

After two years of investigation by Bulgarian, British, and German authorities, an international crime ring planning to smuggle thousands of ancient artifacts into England has been caught. According to The Times, the 4,600 items ranged from spears and coins to funeral urns, ceramics, and arrowheads.

The artifacts span from the Bronze and Iron Age to the Middle Ages. Some of the relics were illegally excavated from Roman-era military camps in Bulgaria. They were then smuggled into Germany, with the ultimate goal being legitimate sales in the London art market.

According to Heritage Daily, the gang chose Germany as its transit country and hired private U.K. transportation companies to bring the goods into England. Little did they know that Bulgarian police received a tip-off in March 2018 — after which surveillance on the group began in earnest.

Were it not for the successful sting operation on behalf of authorities from three different countries, the eight individuals now under arrest would’ve made several millions of euros. The remarkable goods, meanwhile, would have been likely been dispersed across private homes around the world.

A task force came together to stop the smugglers, coordinated by Europol and conducted by the General Directorate for the Fight against Organized Crime of the Bulgarian Ministry of Internal Affairs.

They worked for hand in hand with the British Metropolitan Police, as well as the German State Criminal Police of Bavaria, under an umbrella operation called MEDICUS.

As the existence of the looted goods wasn’t officially known, proving their illicit origin is difficult to do. With forged provenance and documentation on top, the legal ownership of these artifacts would appear entirely legitimate to auction houses or interested parties.

Only diligent surveillance and monitoring of the group allowed authorities to confirm their suspicions. Five of the eight gang members were arrested before leaving Bulgaria. Three of them were permitted to enter the U.K., thus committing the crime of smuggling goods across, before being arrested.

The group of three was detained after entering the U.K. in Dover. Two men aged 19 and 55 and one 67-year-old women were arrested. According to The Southend Standard, the charge was suspicion of handling stolen goods, and the artifacts concealed in the suspects’ vehicle quickly confirmed as much.

“The arrests were made as part of an ongoing investigation into the theft of cultural artifacts in Europe which is being led by detectives from the Met’s art and the antique unit,” the Metropolitan Police said.

This sting operation dates to October 2019, but Europol has only now felt assured enough that publishing any details won’t jeopardize other operations nor the trials of these eight individuals. Europol explained in a statement that auction houses are commonly part of such illegal sales.

“This case confirms that the most common way to dispose of archaeological goods illegally excavated is by entering the legitimate art market,” the agency said.

Last month, the arts and crafts chain Hobby Lobby was caught having illegally purchased an ancient tablet inscribed with part of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

On top of that, the $1.6 million artifacts were only one of the thousands of relics looted and smuggled from Iraq that the company had illegally bought.

Hopefully, more time and effort is spent on preventing this seemingly ubiquitous practice. Cultural artifacts belong to the people of their countries — and should be displayed for them to cherish and learn from. At least in this latest case, it appears that this kind of justice is being fought for.

Medieval Settlement Uncovered in Bulgaria

Archaeology in Bulgaria reports that an unidentified medieval settlement has been discovered in northwestern Bulgaria by a team of researchers, led by Elena Vasileva of Bulgaria’s National Archaeological Institute with Museum, who were investigating the path of a road construction project.

Near the Danube city of Vidin in Northwest Bulgaria, a previously unknown settlement from the Second Bulgarian Empire in the High Middle Ages and a layer from an early Bronze Age settlement from the 3rd millennium BC were uncovered.

The ruins previously unknown medieval settlement from the time of the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185-1396/1422) and structures from an Early Bronze Age settlement have been found near the town of Tarnyane, 12 kilometres away from Vidin, on the banks of the Voynishka River, which forms two waterfalls before flowing into the Danube.

The discoveries have been during rescue excavations for the construction of the Vidin – Ruzhintsi – Montana road (E79 road) in Northwest Bulgaria, bTV reports citing lead archaeologist Assist. Prof. Elena Vasileva from the National Institute and Museum of Archaeology in Sofia.

Vasileva, who points that construction project often provides invaluable opportunities to study otherwise neglected or unknown archaeological monuments, has been in charge of archaeological site No. 7 out of a total of eight archaeological sites slated for rescue excavations along the route of the road in question. The digs were carried out from September until November 2020.

The previously unknown medieval settlement near Vidin and Tarnyane existed in the 11th – 14th century on an area of a total of 54 decares (nearly 14 acres) on both banks of the Voynishka River.

The archaeological team has excavated there a total of 47 structures from the 11th – 14th century AD.

These include 23 pits with an average depth of 2.5 meters; a moat which is 1 meter deep and 5 meters wide; eight kilns, six dwellings, including three dugouts, and one human grave.

According to the lead archaeologist, the newly discovered site is one of the few open-type settlements, i.e. with no fortifications, from the period of the Second Bulgarian Empire to have ever been researched in today’s Bulgaria.

“It contains all elements of a settlement, namely, dwellings, pits, production kilns, and a necropolis,” Vasileva says.

“Of structures, the most interesting ones are some of the pits that we’ve explored, which have a large diameter and depth, and contain animals remains – of houses and less so of smaller animals – sheep, goats, and poultry.

This practice is typical of such structures from earlier periods, i.e. the time of the First Bulgarian Empire (632/680 – 1018) but not of the later periods,” she explains.

During the medieval settlement’s excavations, the archaeological team has found a total of 350 artefacts, including coins, arrow tips, tools such as knives, chisels, awls, scrapers, loom weights, parts of copper vessels, pottery vessels such as pots and jugs, adornments such as rings, metal and glass bracelets, parts from earrings, buckles, crosses, and medallions.

Towards the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century, today’s Northwest Bulgaria and part of Eastern Serbia were part of the Vidin Tsardom, a rump state of the Second Bulgarian Empire, which was the last part of Bulgaria to be conquered by the invading Ottoman Turks.

In addition to the medieval settlement from the Second Bulgarian Empire in the High Middle Ages, the archaeological site near Tarnyane on the Voynishka River also yielded a layer from the Early Bronze Age, from the so-called Magura – Cotofeni Culture, from the 3rd millennium BC. From it, the researchers have excavated one dwelling and one grave.

“The drilling surveying shows that in the 3rd millennium BC the convenient tall bank of the Voynishka River had a settlement, and later, in the 2nd millennium BC, to the south of it there was a necropolis,” Vasileva is quoted as saying.

Both the Early Bronze Age layer and the medieval settlement from the High Middle Ages will be excavated further in 2021.

The rescue excavations in 2020 have included archaeologists and archaeology students from the National Institute and Museum of Archaeology in Sofia, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Veliko Tarnovo University “St. Cyril and St. Methodius”, and experts from the National Institute of Morphology, Pathology, and Anthropology, and the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia.

An Ancient Mask With An “Alien Face” Dug Up In Bulgaria

This year’s archaeological season at the oldest salt mining center in Europe, which dates back to the 5 – 4th  millennium BC and became the first prehistoric town on the continent, is now over.

The site is located near the present town of Provadia (northeastern Bulgaria) and has been studied for years. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, archaeologists’ work began later this summer, but the season was extremely successful.

The latest find by Prof. Vasil Nikolov and his team is a mass grave. Days ago, while exploring the bottom of an evaporation pool, archaeologists came across 6 skulls, including children’s.

It is not known whether the people buried there were killed in some of the attacks against the fortress city, or whether it was an internal conflict over salt, which was used as currency at the time.

Among the most interesting finds at Provadia-Saltworks this summer is a unique late Chalcolithic artifact. The ancient ceramic object has a triangular shape and shows an anthropomorphic image of a human face. It looks a lot like a mask.

In its upper part, one can see something similar to stylized ears. In addition, the object has two holes, which most likely served for hanging.

The eyes of the mask are elliptical, eyebrows are painted and a nose can be seen.

But the strangest thing is that the human-like image has no mouth, and many say it looks like an alien in a spacesuit. It is assumed that the object was a symbol of high status in the social hierarchy.

The focus of the archaeological works this summer was the fortification systems of the Saltworks, as well as its settlement part, including two houses, one of which was a two-storey building, and its occupants used 400 square meters of space.

The origin of the Saltworks is linked to the largest and only deposit of rock salt in this part of the Balkan Peninsula. Thanks to salt, the inhabitants of the ancient town accumulated innumerable riches.

Prof. Vasil Nikolov connects the salt deposit near today’s Provadia with another unique find in the area – the Varna Chalcolithic Necropolis, where the oldest processed gold in the world was discovered, dating back to the same era as the Saltworks.

Thracian King Sevt III discovered: 2,400-yr-old Solid gold mask weighing 640 gr found near the village of Shipka

A 2,400-year-old golden mask that once belonged to a Thracian king was unearthed in a timber-lined tomb in southeastern Bulgaria, archaeologists reported.

The mask, discovered over the weekend, was found in the tomb along with a solid gold ring engraved with a Greek inscription and the portrait of a bearded man.

“These finds confirm the assumption that they are part of the lavish burial of a Thracian king,” said Margarita Tacheva, a professor who was on the dig near the village of Topolchane, 180 miles (290 kilometers) east of the capital, Sofia.

Georgi Kitov, the team leader, said that they also found a silver rhyton, silver and bronze vessels, pottery, and funerary gifts.

“The artifacts belonged to a Thracian ruler from the end of the 4th century B.C. who was buried here,” Kitov added. According to Kitov, the Thracian civilization was at least equal in terms of development to the ancient Greeks.

The Thracians lived in what is now Bulgaria and parts of modern Greece, Romania, Macedonia, and Turkey between 4,000 B.C. and the 8th century A.D. when they were assimilated by the invading Slavs.

In 2004, another 2,400-year-old golden mask was unearthed from a Thracian tomb in the same area.

Dozens of Thracian mounds are spread throughout central Bulgaria, which archaeologists have dubbed “the Bulgarian valley of kings” in reference to the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt, home to the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs.

Seuthes III (Sevt III)

Seuthes III was the ruler of the Odrysian kingdom of Thrace from c. 331 BC to c. 300 BC, After the campaigns of Philip II in 347–342 a significant part of Thrace was dependent on Macedon.

After Philip’s death in 336 BC, many of the Thracian tribes revolted against Philip’s son Alexander the Great, who waged a campaign against and defeated the Getae and King Syrmus of the Triballi. All other Thracians sent troops to join Alexander’s army.

Seuthes revolted against Macedon in about 325 BC, after Alexander’s governor Zopyrion was killed in battle against the Getae.

After Alexander died in 323 BC he again took up arms in opposition to the new governor Lysimachus. They fought each other to a draw and each withdrew from the battle.

Ultimately Seuthes was compelled to acknowledge the authority of Lysimachus, by then one of Alexander’s successor kings.

In 320 BC, Seuthes III moved the Odrysian kingdom to central Thrace and built his capital city at Seuthopolis (Kazanlak, present-day Bulgaria).

In 313 BC he supported Antigonus I in the latter’s war against Lysimachus, occupying the passes of Mount Haemus against his overlord but was again defeated and forced to submit

Three Settlements Unearthed in Southern Bulgaria

In three rescue excavations near the town of Radnevo, three different ancient settlements are discovered funded by a coal mining company, the most interesting was a new artefact was a statuette of the ancient goddess Athena, an early Thracian settlement a town from the time of the Roman Empire, and an early Byzantine and mediaeval Bulgarian settlement.

The rescue excavations have been carried out by the Maritsa East Archaeological Museum in Radnevo with funding from the Maritsa East Mines Jsc company, a large state-owned coal mining company, on plots slated for coal mining operations.

An Early Ancient Thracian settlement has been discovered in the first researched location to the west of the town of Polski Gradets, Radnevo Municipality, Stara Zagora District, (in an area called “Dyado Atanasovata Mogila”), the Maritsa East Mines company has announced.

The Maritsa East Archaeological Museum has not announced the precise dating of the site but the Early Thracian period would typically refer to ca. 1,000 BC, the Early Iron Age.

The rescue excavations on the site of the Early Thracian settlements were carried out in September and October 2020 by a team led by Assoc. Prof. Krasimir Nikov and Assoc. Prof. Rumyana Georgieva, both of them archaeologists from the National Institute and Museum of Archaeology in Sofia.

The archaeologists have discovered the ruins of Thracian residential and “economic” buildings. The artefacts discovered in the site include anthropomorphic figurines, pottery vessels, ceramic spindle whorls, loom weights, millstones, stone tools used for polishing and hammering. Inside the ritual pits of the Early Thracian settlement near Radnevo, the archaeologists have found human burials.

In them, the humans were buried in a fetal position (in archaeological texts in Bulgaria and some other European and Asian countries, it is known as the “hocker position” – in which the knees are tucked against the chest).

The Maritsa East Museum says that the discovery of the Early Thracian settlement has yielded new “information about the settlement structure of the Thracian Age.”

In the second location subject to rescue excavations near Bulgaria’s Radnevo (in an area called “Boyalaka”), an archaeological team has found the periphery of a settlement from the 2nd – 4th century AD, i.e. the period of the Roman Empire, which also existed in later periods, all the way into the Middle Ages.

The excavations in question have covered a large area of about 40 decares (10 acres) on a plot slated for coal mining. The archaeological team has performed a total of 32 drillings at selected spots in order to designate areas for further more detailed excavations.

On the surface, the archaeologists have found pottery from different time periods – from the Roman Era, the Early Byzantine Era, the Middle Ages, and the Late Middle Ages – the time of the medieval Bulgarian Empire. The archaeologists have unearthed bricks, tegulae, and a glazed plate from the Late Antiquity period.

“We assume this was the periphery of a settlement from the Roman Era – 2nd – 4th century AD, which developed in the western direction. The eight [Roman] coins that we have found during the drillings also confirm this dating,” says Plamen Karailiev, Director of the Maritsa East Archaeological Museum in Radnevo. The most interesting artefact from the Roman Era settlement in question is a bronze statuette depicting Ancient Thracian, Greek, and the Roman goddess Athena.

“What’s generating interest is the bronze statuette depicting goddess Athena, which is the first of its kind to become part of the collection of [our] museum,” the museum director states. In the same location, however, the archaeologists have also discovered for the first time pottery fragments from the Bronze Age, which the Museum says is adding information to the site’s stratigraphy for future excavations to precede the coal mining there.

The third location excavated at the request of the state mining company near Radnevo in 2020 is near the town of Troyanovo (in an area called “Vehtite Lozya”), where an archaeological team has discovered structures from a settlement from the Early Byzantine period, i.e. Late and Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, and from the medieval period when the region at different times was part of the First and Second Bulgarian Empire and the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire).

There the archaeological team led by Krasimir Velkov from the Tvarditsa Museum of History and Tatyana Kancheva from the Maritsa East Museum of Archaeology has found a wide range of early medieval and medieval structures.

These include a total of 12 dwellings, 7 semi-dugouts which, however, were not used as homes, i.e. for residential purposes, a total of 14 pits, two household kilns and one hearth. The excavations of the “layer settlement from the Early Byzantine and medieval period” covered an area of 4 decares (app. 1 acre), and were carried out from early August until early October 2020.

The wide range of archaeological artefacts discovered on the site including a number of coins, including two Byzantine “cup-shaped” coins, the so-called scyphates, fragments from bronze and glass bracelets, an iron spur, iron arrow tips, small knives, an iron fishing hook, numerous spindle whorls, clay candlesticks, and lids of pottery vessels.

The 2020 rescue archaeological excavations in all three locations around the town of Radnevo, which is the largest coal mining area in Bulgaria, have been funded by the state-owned Maritsa East Mines company with a combined total of more than BGN 240,000 (app. EUR 120,000).

In a release, the Maritsa East Mines company points out that the first-ever rescue archaeological excavations in the area of Radnevo in Southern Bulgaria were carried out back in 1960 right at the start of the industrial coal mining there.

“For many decades now, Maritsa East Mines Jsc have contributed to the preservation of artefacts from past millennia. The extraction of coal begins only after the respective plots have been researched by archaeologists. The finds from these rescue archaeological expeditions, some of which are unique, have been processed and exhibited at the Maritsa East Museum of Archaeology in Radnevo,” the state-owned company says.

A very interesting archaeological artefact discovered during rescue excavations near Radnevo funded by the coal mining conglomerate has been an Ancient Thracian clay altar from the 4th century BC.

19th-Century Polish Sword Unearthed in Bulgaria

A sword in a Bulgarian museum has been identified as a 19th-century Polish nationalist sabre. It was discovered near the city of the Veliko Tarnovo in northern Bulgaria where curators from the Archaeological Museum saw it had a Polish inscription.

An expert from the University of Warsaw recognized the inscription Vivat Szlachcic Pan I foundation wojska (“Long live the Noble Lord and founder of the army”) and engraved iconography as one wielded by Polish patriots during the January Uprising against Russia’s autocratic rule.

The January Uprising (1863-1864) was one several attempts by Polish patriots to re-establish the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth in the Russian Kingdom of Poland. Russian Poland was carved out of the Duchy of Warsaw at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

The kingdom was supposed to be largely autonomous, nominally under the rule of the Tzar, but governed by its own parliament, defended by its own army and bound by the Polish constitution.

Tzar Alexander I and his successor Nicholas I had other plans, and between the two of them, they quashed the country’s traditional religious and political freedoms and made it a puppet state of the Russian Empire.

Nationalist resistance to Russian rule grew in the wake of its losses in the Crimean War. In January 1863, pro-Russian Polish aristocrat Aleksander Wielopolski, adjutant to the Polish viceroy, ordered the conscription of Polish nationalists into the Imperial Russian Army for 20-year terms.

He knew the movement for Polish independence was working up to an uprising and thought strongarming its young men into military service would break up the movement. Instead, it triggered the very uprising he was trying to prevent.

It was the longest uprising for Polish national unity under Russian rule, but it too ultimately collapsed under the weight of Russia’s superior military strength.

The results were brutal — executions, mass deportations to Siberia, punitive taxation, the complete erasure of the Polish language in government and schools and the replacement of all Polish government officials with Russians.

The newly-discovered sword was inscribed during this period. The curved karabela type, a Polish sabre used during the halcyon days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th and 18th centuries, was an emblem of Polish culture and independence.

During the uprisings of the 19th centuries, they were engraved with slogans and imagery harkening back to the Commonwealth.

[Professor Piotr Dyczek] added: “The sabre was probably the spoils of an officer of the Tsarist army who participated in the suppression of the January Uprising in 1863 and 1864, who then fitted it with a silver hilt typical for a shashka – a sabre with an open hilt with a split pommel.”

Presumably that Russian soldier took the sword out of Poland after the uprising was suppressed. At that time, Bulgaria was under the Ottoman rule as it had been since 1393, but a decade after the January Uprising, Bulgaria had an uprising of its own in April 1876.

Russia was a fan of this one, though, since wresting the Balkans out of Ottoman hands would extend their sphere of influence which had been whittled away by the Crimean War.

They jumped on the opportunity and the Russo-Turkish War began in 1877. It ended when the Imperial Russian Army took Tarnovo in July 1878. The Polish sword was probably used (and lost) in that battle.

Giant human skeleton unearthed in Varna, Bulgaria

The remains of what archaeologists in Bulgaria identified as a “massive skeleton” have been discovered in downtown Varna, a city on the shores of the Black Sea which is rich in culture and civilisation for 7,000 years.

Sofia News Agency, Novinite, reports that the skeleton was found in what was once the ancient city of Odessos, a trading post established by the Greeks towards the end of the 7th century BC.

Odessos was a mixed community made up of Ionian Greeks and the Thracian tribes (Getae, Krobyzoi, Terizi). Later it was controlled by the Thracians, Macedonians, and then Romans.

The Roman city, Odessus, covered 47 hectares in present-day central Varna and had prominent public baths, Thermae, erected in the late 2nd century AD, now the largest Roman remains in Bulgaria.

Researchers have said that initial analyses suggest the skeleton belongs to a man who lived in the late 4 th or early 5 th century AD, a time when Odessus was an early Christian centre.

Valeri Yotov, who is part of the team carrying out excavations there, is reported as telling local news websites that the size of the bones is “impressive” and that they belonged to “a very tall man”. However, Yotov would not reveal the exact height of the skeleton.

The remains were found near the remains of the ancient city wall and Yotov has suggested that the man may have died while working or during a ceremony held near the city walls.

“His posture, with hands laid on his waist and his body pointing to the east (head) and west (feet), is a clear indication for archaeologists he was buried,” reports Novinite.

It is not the first time that an over-sized skeleton has been found in Eastern Europe. In 2013, the skeleton of a giant warrior dating back to 1600 BC was found in Santa Mare, Romania.

Nicknamed ‘Goliath’, the warrior measured more than 2 meters in height, highly unusually for the time and place, when people were of small stature (approximately 1.5 meters on average). 

The warrior was buried with an impressive dagger that indicated his high stature.