EUROPA - Centaur archer

EUROPA – National Archaeological Discoveries

Centaur archer

Round brooches made of plated bronze over an iron core are relatively common finds in Slav cemeteries from the eighth and ninth centuries in Slovenia’s Gorenjska region. Notable among them, for the quality of workmanship and, above all, for the depiction of a centaur archer, is this brooch from the Brda cemetery near Bled.

In stylistic terms it belongs to Carolingian art, which drew on illuminated manuscripts. Most comparable artefacts are from sites in the Upper Danube basin and the Rhineland. The figure of the centaur archer developed in Babylonian art before 1000 BC as a symbol of the zodiac sign Sagittarius. It entered Roman and medieval astrological depictions of Sagittarius via Egypt and was later adopted in Christianity.

We will probably never know exactly how this brooch ended up in a Slav grave in the Brda cemetery near Bled. It may have been made by a Christian who based the design on an illustration from an illuminated manuscript. On the other hand, the Slavs, who were pagans when they settled this area in the sixth century and whose Christianisation under the Carolingians had only just begun in the eighth century, probably did not see this design as a Christian symbol but as a pagan one. The centaur archer may have reminded them of Perun the Thunderer, the supreme god of the Slavs, who could also be depicted as a horseman with a thunderbolt or bow in his hand.

Daša Pavlovič,

National Museum of Slovenia