Rosette from cap of Prince Philip II (1573-1618)

Duke Francis I was buried in the crypt under the Castle Church in Szczecin. After the Renaissance reconstruction of the Castle by Duke John Frederick, it became the Szczecin necropolis of the rulers of Pomerania. Apart from three coffins transferred in 1575 from St. Mary's Church, twelve members of the ducal family were buried there. After the funeral of the last ruler from the Griffin dynasty in 1654, the crypt was walled up. It was not officially opened for the first time until 1731, by order of the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I, when the ducal armours stored in the castle church in Szczecin were transferred to the Berlin armoury. Of the fourteen sarcophagi in the crypt, two were already sunken. The others were closed, but from a rather detailed description of the contents of the coffin of Bogislaw XIV, which was opened at that time, it results that it was already missing the most precious jewels. Later, the crypt was opened several more times, e.g., in 1839, a wooden coffin with the remains of Pomeranian dukes from St Mary's Church, which was being demolished, was placed there, and in 1841 a coffin with the corpse of Duchess Elisabeth of Brunswick, the former wife of King Friedrich Wilhelm II.The last time the burial place of the dukes was opened before World War II was in 1862, due to renovation work in the Castle Church and concerns about the condition of the crypt's vault. A committee made up of representatives of the Society for History and Antiquities of Pomerania found that most coffins had already been opened and robbed. From one of the intact sarcophagi, containing the body of Duchess Erdmutha of Brandenburg, the commission removed all the gold jewellery and transferred it to the treasury of the private Hohenzollern Museum in Berlin. A silk embroidered cap and a fragment of a rapier were removed from another sarcophagus, which was mistakenly identified as belonging to Francis I. After this visit, the crypt was walled up again, and the next documents concerning its opening came from 1946. The crypt was then unburied, and the sarcophagi, including Duke Francis I's, in which the set of rosettes presented here was found, were moved together with their contents to other rooms of the Szczecin Castle.

Monika Frankowska-Makała