Star-shaped dress jewellery

Dress jewels or trinkets were tiny jewels intended to be sewn on clothes. They were used to decorate dresses, coats and headgear. These small jewels could also be used as fastening elements of bows or lace rosettes on shoes, as exemplified by rosettes with dress jewels of the Pomeranian Duke Francis I.In the crypt of the Castle Church in Szczecin, only one dress jewel in the form of a star studded with diamonds was found, with a larger stone missing from the centrally placed casket, probably a table cut diamond. It is not known whether there were originally more pieces of this type. It can be confirmed positively since dress jewels as decorative elements were usually found in more significant numbers. It is known that the sarcophagi of the dukes of Szczecin were opened and robbed many times. Already eighteenth-century descriptions made on the occasion of opening the crypt show that in the sarcophagus of Bogislaw XIV, the last of the Griffins, buried in 1654, some of the most valuable jewels set with diamonds were missing. After the Second World War, the crypt was emptied after its demolition, and only two intact sarcophagi were found. Only single jewels from the remaining sarcophagi opened earlier had survived.

Monika Frankowska-Makała