Silver necklace

Silver neck-ring found in a hoard discovered in 1900 while clearing trees in a roadside forest between the villages of Laska and Dramino, in Kamieński district. The neck-ring is braided out of four pairs of wires, twisted around each other. The twist is loosest in the middle section, which is why the neck-ring is the thickest there. Both ends of the rim are flattened and formed into elongated oval plates ending in an eyelet on one side and a hook on the other. Both are decorated with a border of flat granules and two rows of granule-filled triangles. The hoard from which the neck-ring came originally included 11 kilograms of silver Arab and European coins, as well as entire and fragmented ornaments. In the final days of World War II, the hoard was taken away and hidden in a safe place, while the neck-ring remained in Szczecin. It was not until 2009 that the hoard returned to Szczecin and ended up in the collection of the National Museum there; however, many of the pieces were missing. Only 24 fragments of Arabic dirhams and silver jewellery – temple rings, earrings of various kinds, kaptorga bags decorated with zoomorphic motifs, pendants, including a fragment of a lunula, beads of various shapes, a fragment of a necklace clasp, finger-rings made of pairs of wires and unidentified elements of various ornaments – survived to the present day. The hoard dates back to the mid-10th century.

Ewa Górkiewicz-Bucka