Silver necklace

A silver neck-ring discovered in 1886 in unknown circumstances on the so-called Góra Zbójców (Robbers’ Mountain) near Połczyn-Zdrój in Świdwin district as a part of a hoard consisting of silver coins and ornaments placed in a clay vessel, covered with a stone. The deposit originally contained 215 coins and ornaments – completed and in fragments. To this day, only 3 Arabian dirhams, a neck-ring and fragments of unrecognized ornaments have survived from the hoard. The hoard dates back to the 10th century. The neck-ring is braided out of five pairs of wires, twisted around each other. The tips were flattened into oval, undecorated plates. One of them ends with a hook, while the other end is broken off. In the middle section, the twist on the wires is looser, making the neck-ring thicker in this part. The neck-rings in the early Middle Ages were usually made of silver, with bronze being a less popular choice. They were made out of wires in several ways – from a plain, singular wire with a round or quadrangular cross-section, sometimes flattened into a ribbon, through necklaces twisted from two or three wires, all the way to accessories made out of several pairs of wires - from two to eight. The simplest neck-rings had their ends twisted into an eyelet and a hook, while the ends of more elaborate ornaments were flattened into oval or rhomboid plates ending in an S-shaped hook and a teardrop-shaped eyelet. Some were adorned.

Ewa Górkiewicz-Bucka